


Litany

by infernalandmortal



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-01-30 20:32:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12660906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infernalandmortal/pseuds/infernalandmortal
Summary: "Every morning the maple leaves.Every morning another chapter where the hero shiftsfrom one foot to the other. Every morning the same bigand little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out:You will be alone always and then you will die."After leaving an abusive relationship, Murphy moves into his best friend's house. He's fine, really. Their new roommate comes with more than enough baggage of her own.(A Memori college AU)Title and excerpts fromLitany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Outby Richard Siken.





	1. You Will Be Alone Always

**Author's Note:**

> it's ya girl Amanda back at it again with the angsty Memori AUs because Little Beast wasn't enough for me apparently
> 
> pls be advised: there are mentions of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in this story. It's not explicit (more implied) but it is there, and I don't want to trigger or harm anyone unnecessarily.
> 
> Go nuts, and let me know what you think!

_ Every morning the maple leaves.  _

_ Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts  _

_ from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big  _

_ and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out: _

You will be alone always and then you will die.

* * *

**Then**

_ “He’s not answering his phone,” Raven says, thumping her bag down on the floor. Bellamy turns from his computer, bracing his hands on the kitchen counter. “I’m worried.” _

_ “I’ll go over there.” Bellamy’s already got his keys in his hand, his phone in his pocket. “I’ll text Miller and Bryan on my way.” _

_ Raven’s brows pinch together. “It’s her. I know it is.” _

_ Bellamy shakes his head. “I know. We need to get him out of there.” _

_ “Hard to do when she cuts him off from everyone. It’s textbook, Bell!” _

_ A sigh. “I know.” _

* * *

Unsurprisingly, the house is already awake when Murphy drags himself out of bed.

Still half-asleep, he stumbles downstairs, lured by the smell of waffles. Bellamy and Octavia are already in the kitchen, along with Raven and Miller. Bacon sizzles on the stove, popping whenever the younger Blake jabs it with a fork. 

“Morning, sunshine,” Raven says jokingly, giving Murphy a side hug. He lets her, though he flinches as soon as she pulls away. His skin crawls from her hands on him, and he hates it - hates it so much he wants to throw up and die, or at the very least, go back to bed.

He takes a piece of bacon from the pan. His fingers ache from the heat. Miller watches him carefully, but Murphy does nothing, says nothing. He eats the meat without tasting it, feeling the delicate skin on his tongue burn.

“Wow, your mouth is, like, indestructible or something,” Octavia comments. “Bellamy would be reaching for an ice cube right about now.”

“You’re one to talk,” Bellamy grumbles. “You couldn’t even handle the  _ pico de gallo  _ Raven made last week.”

“It was spicy!” Octavia defends. “Who in their right mind makes something that hot?”

Murphy sits at the breakfast bar and tunes them out, staring out into space and letting his eyes unfocus, then refocus. They eventually land on the fridge calendar, and he stares at today’s date, where  _ Emori arrives  _ is written in bright red pen.

“Raven,” he calls. “When’s the new tenant moving in?”

“She should be here soon,” Raven replies. “And the least you can do is call her our roommate.”

Murphy rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”

It’s as if their conversation summons her. There’s a knock at the door, and Murphy goes to get it because it’s either that or watch Bellamy destroy the waffle he’s trying to remove from the iron. It’s painful, honestly.

The girl in front of him is small, a little shorter than him, with long, dark hair, wide eyes and full lips parted in surprise. When she speaks, he hears a bit of an accent. “I- Which one are you?”

“What?”

“I only know your names.” She tilts her head. “Are you John?”

There’s something about his name on her lips that makes him shiver. “Yep,” he says, popping the ‘p,’ purposefully stiffening his body language. He looks past her. A van is trundling down the road, away from the house.

Raven chooses this moment to appear behind him.

“You must be Emori,” she says, sticking her hand out and shoving Murphy aside in the same motion. “I’m Raven. We talked on the phone.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says, shaking her hand. Her tone is gentle, but she doesn’t smile. Murphy sees lines around her eyes, but the set of her brow tells him something different.

She is not happy.

The ratty old duffle bag in her hand and the backpack on her shoulders are the only personal belongings she has. Murphy takes the bag from her and leads her upstairs, to the room next to his - the room that used to be Luna’s.

“I don’t know what Raven told you,” he says, dropping the bag on the bed. “This used to be Luna’s room. You’ll meet her at some point - she’s always over here. She moved to graduate housing this semester.”

“Graduate housing? What’s she studying?” Emori looks out the window. They’re on the second floor, so there’s not much of a view.

“Psychology.” He smirks. “She’s not the best person to have around in a house full of fucked-up people.”

Emori doesn’t say anything, just looks at him. Her eyes are brown, he realizes, and full of questions and something darker - something that makes him ache when he looks at her.

_ You will be alone always _ , he tells himself, remembering the poem he fell asleep reading last night, the one that almost made him cry,  _ and then you will die. _

He had his chance, and it was spent over and over, in a bed and a house that no one wanted, that no one loved.

“This is all you have?” he asks, motioning to her bags, then shoving his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t even see anyone stop to say goodbye.”

Her shoulders hunch forward, her eyes shutter, and he wonders what exactly he said to frighten her. “It’s all I need.”

“Do you want...help?” He thinks better of the question the moment it leaves his mouth. The door is open, but everyone else is downstairs, and the music is loud - too loud - and no one will hear him.

She laughs. The sound makes him jump at first, and then he freezes.  _ Oh _ , he thinks, letting the sound roll over him. It’s warm and low, tumbling from her throat over her lips. “I think I can manage. But thanks, John.”

He leaves, goes next door to his room, and flops down on the bed. He hears her padding around, her boots thumping against the worn wood. He examines the burns on his fingertips from the bacon. They’ll be gone by tomorrow.

* * *

“What do you think of her?” Raven asks Murphy, pointing up the stairs and settling next to him on the couch, resting her bad leg against the footstool kicked haphazardly to the side.

Murphy shrugs. “Seems like she’ll be quiet. Which is good, because I’m not about to share a wall with someone who’s up all night.”

“Yeah,” Raven snorts. “Because I totally picked her to room with us because of your personal comfort and safety.”

“Shut up, Reyes,” he laughs, shoving her gently. She laughs and reaches for the remote, turning on the TV and leaning her head on Murphy’s shoulder.

“I’m glad we’re friends again,” she murmurs. “I’m glad you’re here instead of there.”

He feels himself tense, then relax when she doesn’t say anything more. He hears a creak on the stairs and looks up sharply, sighing when he sees Emori looking down at them.

“You can come down,” he says to her. She looks to him, then to Raven, and descends the stairs like she’s ready to fight, right fist clenched, jaw set. She sits on the arm of the couch, right near Murphy’s arm, and looks down at them both.

“Girlfriend?” she asks.

Murphy shakes his head. Raven laughs. “No,” she says. “That would be like oil and water. We’re just close friends.”

She looks to Murphy. Murphy says nothing, just shifts uncomfortably. He can feel her presence; she’s close - too close - and he almost wants to shy away from her. He forces himself to breathe normally and clenches his hands into fists. Raven doesn’t notice.

“You can sit with us,” he finally says, motioning to the spot near Raven. Raven scoots over so Emori can sit comfortably. He breathes a sigh of relief.

“What are you majoring in, again?” Raven asks her.

“Social work,” she says quietly, toughly, with a firm chin, as if she’s expecting an argument. “I’ve got an associates, but I’ve got to get the bachelors now.”

“Oh, so you’re a junior?” Raven grins. “Me too. I’m in engineering, though, so kinda different. Murphy’s a sophomore, but he’s undeclared.”

Emori looks at him over Raven’s head. “You’ve got time,” she tells him, as if she thinks he’d be worried about that sort of thing. In reality, he can’t be bothered at all.

They turn their attention back to the TV. Raven falls asleep after a while, her head still on Murphy’s shoulder. When he looks up, Emori is looking back at him.

“Settled in okay?” he asks, voice low, heart in his throat. What is he doing? Why is he talking to her?

She nods. “I guess.”

“Glad to have your own room? I used to share with Bellamy - it sucked.”

She shrugs again. Her left hand is wrapped in some kind of cloth, and she picks at it. Murphy wonders why it’s covered up, why it’s so stained, why she feels the need to shrink into the couch. “I shared a room for a while. It’s not so bad.”

Murphy snorts. “I’d hate it. People going through my shit, talking,  _ snoring _ .” He rolls his eyes. “Bellamy’s snoring was the worst.”

“Well, they had bed checks and curfews, so…” she doesn’t meet his eyes. He frowns in confusion. “Besides, it’s not like you’re allowed to have anything personal in prison.”

She looks up, and their eyes lock. Her defiant chin says  _ what’re you going to do about it?  _ Her eyes plead for acceptance.

Murphy doesn’t know what to say, but he knows he should say something. “We’ve all got our shit,” he says. It’s fucking pathetic, but better than nothing. “Are you reformed or whatever?”

She smiles. It looks like relief, like a sharp knife. “Hell no.”

He likes her a lot more after that.

* * *

In rare (read: nearly-impossible) form, the entire house eats dinner together, crowded around the dining room table that is really only meant to seat four. Raven’s idea was for Emori to get to know them all a little better. So far, it hasn’t backfired horribly, much to Murphy’s relief.

Murphy cooks: a pot roast with garlic butter, biscuits and green beans. Emori’s eyes grow wide when she sees the amount of food on the table. He thinks she even mutters  _ holy shit  _ under her breath. She waits to eat until everyone else is halfway done, staring at her full plate and fisting her hands in her shirt.

“Okay, so,” Raven announces once the initial feeding frenzy is over. “Lets throw it back to freshman orientation and go around and say our names and majors and shit.”

“Jasper Jordan, freshman,” Jasper gives Emori a wave. “I room with Monty here,” he points his thumb at his best friend, “and I’m majoring in chemistry.”

“Monty Green, freshman, computer science.”

“Octavia Blake, freshman, criminal justice.” She gestures to Lexa, who’s sitting across from her. “Lexa’s the same, only she’s a junior.”

Lexa finishes chewing her bite of food, then waves at Emori. “What she said.”

“And you already know me and Murphy,” Raven finishes, leaning back and taking a satisfied sip of her beer.

Emori gives a small, general wave, then takes a tiny bite of food. “This is good,” she tells Murphy. “Thank you.”

He nods in reply, then smiles ever-so-slightly when he looks up to see her smiling back at him.

She helps him with the dishes after dinner, loading the dishwasher one-handed and humming along to the music playing from the living room. Octavia and Lexa are printing out their syllabi for tomorrow’s classes, Raven is trying to fix something that could either be a dvd player or a weird-looking roomba, and Monty and Jasper have escaped somewhere upstairs to play video games.

It’s quiet, almost peaceful, and it makes Murphy anxious.

There was a time when he would get in trouble for even looking too long at Emori. But that time has passed, so he looks freely, cataloguing the slope of her nose, the flecks of amber in her eyes, the clumsiness with which she uses her left hand. Her body is buried under layers of clothing, and he sees faint scars under her eye and along her collarbone. Prison mementoes? Or something worse?

She looks up at him, mouth twisted wryly, eyes sparkling, and he realizes she said something, but he can't remember what. 

There's a moment of panic, of confusion. What would the consequences be for not listening? But she grins, a flash of white teeth, and says, “Were you looking or listening?”

“You caught me,” he says drily, face the perfect picture of snark and sarcasm. 

She chuckles. The sound is warm, like her laugh from before. He feels his stomach do a slow roll. “I asked if you had class tomorrow,” she repeats nonchalantly, like he's not an idiot for failing to pay attention. 

He pictures his schedule, then shakes his head. “No.”

“I do.” She shuts the dishwasher and pushes the button to make it start. “I’m going to stay on campus and walk around after, though. Just to see where everything is.”

_ I'll go with you,  _ he wants to say, but his throat clamps down around the words. She takes her right hand, brushes it against the kitchen towel, then pulls her hair over one shoulder. It's like a muddy waterfall, but prettier.

Murphy shakes his head at himself, then climbs the stairs to his room. 

* * *

He's woken in the middle of the night by someone shaking his shoulder.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he cries, scrambling backward, colliding against the wall. He will say no this time, he will, he's so tired-

It's Emori. Hair wild, eyes unfocused, confused. Her lips are pulled into a worried line. “You were screaming,” she says, and her voice is rough, ungodly. 

“I'm sorry.”

She looks like she wants to touch him. “What happened?”

Murphy shrugs. “The same shit.”

He remembers the dream. A rope, the knife, creaking of floorboards, a broken phone, Raven’s frantic calls. 

He can't go back to sleep. 

There's a park across the street, and he goes there. He sits on the swings, and Emori follows, like a ghost, because he didn't explicitly tell her to get lost. There’s something in her that welcomes the darkness in him. She takes it in like it’s nothing more than a cup of tea after a long day, like it’s as easy as picking the lock on his bedroom door.

Twice, she inhales, opens her mouth as if to speak. She doesn’t, and he's grateful. Breathing the night air feels like crying.

“I only woke you up because it sounded like you'd be better off here than in your dream,” she murmurs when the sun breaks through the darkness. How long have they been sitting there? An hour? Two? Three?

“Thank you,” he says, and then the guilt rolls over him.

_ You will be alone always, and then you will die.  _

He studies her after she leans her head against the swing’s chain and closes her eyes. Button nose, firm chin, right hand clenched into a fist, left hand-

Oh.

It’s long, covered in dead skin and bloody patches and scars, fingers welded together like pincers. It looks like a tree branch. It looks strong. It looks like her. He feels a strange affection for it, for the little nub on the side of her hand near her pinky, for the rippling muscles at her wrist.

“It’s hideous,” she says without opening her eyes, like she knows what he was thinking, like she’s determined to say the opposite.

He reaches for it, and she lets him lift it up, lips parting in a shaky sigh as he runs his fingers over it. He hates rosebud lips, but not hers. “I wouldn’t cover it up,” he says, and he’s so honest he thinks his head might explode. “I think it’s pretty badass.”

Several things happen at once. The sky gets lighter, and so do her shoulders. She laughs, smiles, eyes crinkling at the edges, turning to liquid amber. “Liar,” she says, but she’s still laughing.

He can make someone happy.

“It’s not all you are,” he tells her, echoing Raven, echoing Luna, echoing the shrink he went to see all of once before he found better absolution at the bottom of a bottle. 

“It’s all they see,” she replies, eyelids fluttering. The faint arch of a tattoo curls over her cheek, her nose, her brow. Was that always there? He can’t remember. He lives in a fever dream, one foot in the present, the other in a dusty bedroom.

“It’s not all I see,” he says. He sees life, a girl without scars, so soft and hard at the same time. He wants to ask her about prison, about life before and life after. He wants to know if she still wakes up in chains.

She opens her eyes, looks up at him. He imagines she’s leaning against his shoulder. He pretends her warmth is spreading through him, filling him. “I guess you’d better keep an eye on me then.”

He smirks at that, and the fever dream feeling disappears. It’s him and her, and she did have that tattoo last night, only he hadn’t noticed. The birds are chirping, and he sees Octavia’s light on across the street.

He’s so tired. His shoulders slump. He leans his head against the chain again and closes his eyes.

“Let’s go,” she says, standing, boots scuffing the dirt. He doesn’t let go of her hand until they walk through the door.

“You left it unlocked,” Raven says, not looking at her, looking at him.

Murphy ignores her and climbs the stairs. He collapses into bed, shoes on, and waits for Emori to leave.

“I locked that door,” he remembers aloud. “How did you-”

She smirks with a quirk of her brow. “I picked the lock.”

She leaves, locks the door behind her. He throws his arm over his eyes and breathes deeply. It’s a long time before he sleeps.


	2. Poor Sad Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why were you arrested?”
> 
> “I was careless. I got caught.” A bite of chocolate, sugar sliding down her throat. Her leg itches. She unties her boots. “What did you dream about last night?”
> 
> His eyes darken. “Not being able to say no.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lord help me, I'm back on my BS.
> 
> Big thanks to interlude for the edits and for screaming in the doc comments about Otan and Emori's relationship.

_ So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog  _

_ of non-definitive acts,  _

_ something other than the desperation.  _

_ Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.  _

_ Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party _

_ and seduced you  _

_ and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. _

* * *

 

**Then**

_ The con was perfect. _

_ She revels in it as she leaves the club. She’s good at faking, good at weaving clever lies and pretend tears. She can bend anyone to her will, and it feels so damn good. _

_ “Em!” her brother waves to her, weaving through the crowd. He’s been drinking; the color is high in his cheeks, and his eyes are just unfocused enough to make him sway on his feet. “How’d it go?” _

_ She grins, high on success, cocky in her satisfaction. “Perfectly.” Then, with a satisfied grin, “You’re welcome.” _

_ His eyes smile at her, catch on something over her shoulder, and his face falls. “Shit, Em, we have to go.” _

_ She turns on her heel, looking behind her, trying to catch sight of the thing terrifying enough to horrify her brother. “Why?” _

_ When she looks back, Otan is gone. _

* * *

Emori is a horrible person.

She already knows this, but she reminds herself as she looks in the mirror, the glass still foggy from her shower.

When she had heard John screaming through the walls last night, her first instinct was to yell “shut up!” and go back to sleep. But she wasn’t in prison anymore, and John was shouting like someone was coming for his blood. Still, she hesitated to get up and save him from the horrors in his head.

So yes. A horrible person.

She wonders what came over her - why she followed him outside last night. Then she wonders why he was screaming, what is following him so closely that he never has any peace. It’s not any of her business, it really isn’t, but the broken thing inside him is clawing its way out, and she’s always been a lover of broken things.

She has three classes today, back-to-back, starting at noon. She waited to get up until she heard Raven, Lexa, Octavia and the boys leave. It’s just her and John now.

The thought should terrify her. Instead, she feels only a flutter of anxiety, one she doesn’t plan on examining the cause of just yet.

She dries off, gets dressed and goes downstairs, her wet hair slapping against her leather jacket, which is basically the nicest thing she owns aside from her knife set.

“Coffee?” John asks without turning around, sliding her a mug. She takes it in her good hand, feels the warmth of the ceramic, sips at it, and grimaces at the taste.

“It’s black.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Cures exhaustion.”

She downs it in mere minutes. Her stomach rumbles but she doesn’t dare go through the fridge. She hasn’t gone grocery shopping yet, and nothing in there is hers. She hasn’t even opened up a bank account, and the $50 sewn into the lining of her backpack is going to disappear faster than she would like.

She doesn’t need to eat - at least, not yet. She needs a job. She needs some sleep. She needs to pretend the last five years were nothing. Not necessarily in that order.

“Do you think I should get my tattoo removed?” she asks John suddenly, breaking the stillness of the kitchen. Anyone else and she’d be shrinking in her seat right now, but he’s different. She senses something in him, a small thing, like a brief flame - something that shivers and aches to be wanted even as he pushes all hope of that away.

They’re one and the same, she supposes - both alike in their hatred and want of the world.

“Which one? The one on your face?” A grimace of guilt shivers over his expression. She wonders why. 

“Yeah.” She taps her left hand against her knee. The fingers twitch, sweat in her wrap. She doesn’t take it off. “It’ll keep me from getting a job, right?”

John shrugs, an easy thing. The slim lines of his shoulders are appealing. When he turns his head to look at her out of the corner of his eye, she sees his sharp cheekbones and dry lips.  _ I’d like to bite those lips,  _ she thinks, and then wants to thump her head against the counter in frustration.

“No,” he answers. “Screw them. Cover it up with makeup if you want to, but don’t take it off.”

He says it forcefully, as if he’s pushing words from his lungs with great effort - as if it costs himself something to give them up. She watches him, wary, but he says no more.

“All right then,” she says. 

An endless silence stretches before them. His phone vibrates on the kitchen counter. He looks at it and gives a small sound of disgust. She peers at it just as it starts ringing.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” she asks.

“No.” He swears under his breath, then swipes the phone open. “Leave me alone,” he growls, then hangs up.

Emori slips from the stool, reaching for her backpack. She doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t look back.

* * *

Classes are blissfully mundane, a departure from crowded prison computer labs, every due date a fight to the finish. She might be “street trash,” as her old foster family reminded her, but she was - is - smart.

There’s a nontraditional student in her beginner’s public health class. Her name is Anya, and Emori likes her instantly. There’s something about her sharp tongue, her harsh tone and her no-nonsense approach to the system’s failings that appeals to Emori.

She rips the lining of her backpack to get to her money, then goes to the small grocery store near the school. She buys cereal, coffee, milk, bread and ham. It costs her fifteen dollars. She also pockets a Swiss Army knife and two chocolate bars. She doesn’t pay for those.

There’s a strange ache settling in her, a longing of sorts - a sadness rising up to choke her. She’s afraid, she thinks, and nervous. What is she doing here? What is she trying to prove? She’s stupid and small and, shit _ ,  _ what if she had been caught stealing. She would have been sent back for sure.

She feels herself shiver in the September heat. She can’t go back. Won’t. She grits her teeth, bares them, frightens a pigeon cooing at the street corner.

“Hey! Emori!” It’s Octavia, standing on that same street corner, books cradled in her arms, her brother at her side. She looks happy, content and safe. It makes Emori want to scream, but she bites her tonge and molds her lips into a smile. She seethes on the inside even as she, but on the inside, she’s seething. She’s a closed book, a ghost in a house of self-made pain. She is nothing if not a con artist. Her ability to fool others with her bravado, sharp smiles and  pretty tongue is nothing new.

She watches herself, as if from a distance, greet the younger girl and nod at her brother. She feels relief when he doesn’t nod back.

“How were classes?” Bellamy is asking both of them. Emori lets Octavia talk. She watches herself pay attention, kick a rock off the sidewalk. Octavia is talking about chemistry. Emori is thinking about the feeling of a swing set chain, cold against her forehead. She’s thinking about her naked hand, John’s fingers, his claim that it is “badass” to be deformed and unwanted.

“Mine were okay,” she answers on autopilot when the siblings turn to look at her. They’re so alike with their angular jaws, harsh noses and lips set automatically into fine lines. Their skin is nothing alike, nor is their hair, but if you saw them for half a second, you would know they belonged to each other.

She and Otan never shared that. They were asymmetrical in all the wrong ways.

Bellamy holds out a hand. “May I? I’m going to the house anyway.”

He wants to carry her bag of groceries. What a gentleman, she thinks wryly. She hands it over. The knife and chocolate in her pocket are heavy. The chocolate is probably melting. She takes it from her jacket and tucks it in with the milk to keep it cold.

“Why are you wearing a jacket?” Octavia asks bluntly. “It’s, like, a hundred degrees out.”

“It’s only 87,” Bellamy corrects mildly, but he’s wondering too.

Emori shrugs. “Thought the classrooms might be cold.” The lie is good.

She smiles to herself. Of course it’s good. It’s her.

* * *

 

John has paper taped to his walls.

She didn’t see that last night. She only saw him, his flailing limbs, his contorted body and all the ways his face screamed for help. When she walks past, it flaps in the breeze from the open window. He’s smoking. A bottle of beer sits on the floor.

“Hey stranger,” she taps on the doorframe. “Care for a bite?”

He looks confused until she tosses him a chocolate bar. “Doesn’t chocolate go with wine?” he asks, bemused, tentative.

“Wine’s too bougie for us,” she replies, laughing slightly. “Can I come in?”

He blinks at her. His eyes are blue, rimmed with a dark edge. Beautiful. So beautiful. “Sure.”

She sits on the floor with him. She takes off her jacket, watches his eyes follow her arms, the jut of her collarbone under her v-neck. Chills run down her spine, but in a good way.

He bites into the chocolate, eyes on the wall ahead of them. The paper on the walls are pages from books. From here, she can read some of it, but not all. Lines jump out at her, lines he has underlined, highlighted, destroyed by circling with a harsh black pen.

_ I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. _

_ Poor sad thing. _ Is that him? Someone else? Who hurt him? Why is she here, sitting on his floor, sitting beside this boy who locks his bedroom door at night, but leaves it open in the morning? Why is she here, in the dust, looking out at an endless sky, a college town, the endless possibilities that belong to everyone but her?

“You ever going to tell me what you were in for?”

It takes a moment for her to realize he’s talking about prison. “You’ll have to earn that,” she replies. A smirk, a grin, and he’s blushing, eyes cast down, beautiful lips spread in an almost-smile. 

“How do I do that?”

She hums, reaches for his bottle. “Answer for answer.” She takes a swig, hands it back to him. “Who was calling you this morning.”

“Someone I wish I had never met.” A sip, a sidelong look. “Why were you arrested?”

“I was careless. I got caught.” A bite of chocolate, sugar sliding down her throat. Her leg itches. She unties her boots. “What did you dream about last night?”

His eyes darken. “Not being able to say no.” He stiffens, gets to his feet. She scrambles up, and his body shifts to accommodate her invasion into his space. They stand before one another, nearly head-to-chin, arms-to-hands. He takes her left one in his and runs his hand over the cloth. “Why do you hate this so much?”

She’s breathing hard. He is too. He licks his lips, and she feels a shock in her veins. “I- it’s-” 

_ Fuck.  _ The best lies hold truths. So where is her lie? Where is the only thing she has to fall back on?

She looks at his face, eyes searching hers, wide-set over a long nose. “It’s the worst thing about me.” Honest enough to hurt her.

_ Bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. _

He scoffs. “I doubt that.” He turns away. The game is over, and she is standing there, vulnerable, in the center of a room that isn’t hers, a house that isn’t hers, a life that isn’t hers.

“It’s a reminder,” she starts, and she’s whispering. Why is she whispering? “It’s a reminder-” she starts again, louder this time, “that I am nothing. That I will always be nothing. That I am erasable and alone.”

_ You poor sad thing. _

John turns. “Emori.” His voice cracks on the second syllable. “You…  _ fuck. _ ”

She flinches. On the inside, a knife is connecting with her cheek; the club’s music hammers in time with her heart; her brother is on the other side of bulletproof glass, but he is not himself.

“You are not nothing,” John whispers vehemently, desperately, surging forward to grab hold of her bad hand. “You’re  _ not _ . Don’t ever say that.”

She looks at his hand on hers. Her eyes fill with tears. Her shoulders tremble once, twice, her hand twitches, and then he’s lurching backward as if she’s slapped him.

“I shouldn’t have- I’m sorry- I’ll-”

“Don’t be.” She reaches into her pocket, wraps her hand around the cold pocketknife. “I...I’ll go.”

He nods, turns away, reaches for the empty beer bottle. She closes the door behind her, hears a loud epithet and breaking glass. The bottle wasn’t meant for her, but the shards on the other side of the wall cut her all the same.

* * *

 

She goes outside after dinner, and sees Jasper lying in the grass.

“You okay?” she asks. He turns his head, and she sees tears on his cheeks. “Shit, what’s wrong?”

He laughs, ugly and broken. The cheerful boy she met last night is peeling off his mask. “Life fucking sucks, that’s what.”

“Care to elaborate?” It’s what one of her professors says. She likes it, likes the way she coaxes ideas out without making them obvious, without making a wrong answer shameful.

“Oh, right,” he laughs again. Someone so young shouldn’t sound so bitter. “You weren’t here.” He pats the grass beside his leg, and she sits. “I had this girlfriend, Maya. But it wasn’t some stupid high-school romance where you get one another off once in a while and kiss under the bleachers.” He sniffs. “It was real. She was real. Real and beautiful and funny. She liked art. Really depressing art, which was fucking hilarious because she was so happy and innocent.”

Emori sits, plucking at the glass with her bad hand, listening to Jasper as he spills his guts, purging himself of a story she understood, the bloody truth of an accident and a bad surgery and a young boy having to watch the girl he loved waste away to nothing.

_ Bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. _

“That sucks,” she says when he’s finished. 

“Yeah.” He sits up, groans, rubs the back of his neck. “I’ve been a shitty friend to Monty. I was horrible to him; hell, I tried to kill myself last year, and I don’t think he’s gotten over it.”

“You two are like brothers,” she reasons quietly. “That kind of thing doesn’t go away overnight.”

“Am I ever going to be okay?” he asks, quietly vulnerable. A light on the front porch switches on. When she looks over her shoulder, John is leaning against the railing, another cigarette in hand, close enough to hear Jasper’s question and her answer.

“I think,” she starts slowly, “I think your ‘okay’ has to change. You’ll always want her. You’ll always miss her. But I-”  _ I have to believe it stops hurting after a while.  _ “I think you’ll feel better the longer you live.”

She hears John shift. She isn’t sure if what she said was a lie or the truth. She’s prepared to believe it’s both.

“Have you ever lost someone?” he asks.

The pain, a dull and rusty knife, plunges into her heart. “Yes,” she answers quickly, not thinking, not feeling. She had her time of mourning in a prison cell.

“How did you deal with it?”

She smirks, remembering. John lights a second cigarette. “I started a yard fight in prison.”

Jasper laughs, nods in appreciation or respect. “Did you win?”

She nods. “They said it was too close to tell. But I won.”

They sit in silence for a while, near the tree full of screaming crickets, the abandoned bird’s nest. John goes inside, up to his room. Raven is talking on the phone. A tall girl with long messy hair - Luna, she learns - sits on the railing of the back deck and looks up at the sky. Bellamy sits beside her and they talk. Monty brings Jasper inside. A car rolls past the house. Emori loses herself in the press and slide of the world turning, the rise and fall of her own chest. She slips away into a dazed numbness, a dark place where the world is allowed to happen to her.

“Come inside.” It’s John, back again. It’s dark now. When did it get so late? She hasn’t seen a car in hours. “It’s almost one in the morning.”

She’s about to say something when a car pulls in, tires crunching in the gravel driveway. She turns, squints into the headlights. Beside her, John freezes. He looks like a cornered animal, like a hunted man.

“John.” The windows roll down, but the headlights stay on. The engine turns off. A girl stands half in, half out of the driver’s side. Black hair, tight jacket, plump cheeks, mean eyes. Emori wants to sneer at her just on principle. “You’re ignoring my calls.”

John’s face is the picture of terror. Above their heads, Octavia’s light flickers on. Emori hears a window slam shut, Jasper and Monty’s shouting, Raven’s swearing.

“Get the hell off my property, Ontari,” Raven snarls, banging the screen door open. John flinches. He’s white-knuckling the porch railing.

John starts to move, striding off the porch in swift steps, pushing past Raven and shoving the girl against her car, his hand around her neck. 

“Murphy!” Bellamy shouts. Emori scrambles to her feet.

“Not so fun when it’s you, huh?” John growls in Ontari’s ear. “Leave me the fuck alone. I’m done with you, I’m done with your bullshit, I’m  _ done _ .” He shoves her again. Her head thumps against the car. “Get out and never come back.”

Emori finally moves. “Let go of her, John,” she says, tugging at his arm. “Let go, it’s not worth it. Let go.”

He does. He reaches for her, hands grasping, shaking, fisting in her shirt, closing around her wrapped hand. Ontari glares at Emori, and she feels her blood boil.

_ How dare you look at me?  _ she wants to ask.  _ How dare you hurt him? _

“Is he your bitch now?” Ontari’s addressing her. Emori sees red.

“Fuck off,” Emori spits, turning away, and then Ontari’s hand is on her arm, twisting Emori back around and spitting in her face.

Emori stands there, saliva running down her cheek, hand clenched into a fist, breath coming sharp.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” John shouts, lunging for Ontari, prying her hand from Emori’s arm. “Get the fuck away from her, you sick-”

“Murphy!” It’s Bellamy, all deep voice and righteous anger. “Enough!” He jogs down the stairs and separates the two of them, all but shoving Ontari back into her car. “Don’t come here again,” he tells her, bodily hauling John up the porch steps.

Emori watches Ontari’s tires spin, scattering gravel and grass. Her spit is warm on her cheek. She wipes it away with the wrap on her hand.

“Are you calm?” Bellamy is asking John when she approaches the steps. John looks up at her, eyes unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice sounds broken. 

_ You poor sad thing. _

“What happened between you two?” she asks. Bellamy tenses. Raven moves aside so Emori can sit beside John. Octavia, Jasper and Monty are at the front window, peeking from around the curtains, eyes wide.

“You don’t have to say anything, Murphy,” Raven says. It’s a lawyer’s warning. You don’t have to incriminate yourself. You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

John shakes his head. “We dated until the middle of last year.” Bellamy bows his head, as if he’s resigned to the story. “It...it wasn’t good. Healthy. Whatever.”

He looks up, turns to Raven, then Bellamy. “You know the story already.”

It’s a hint to leave. They take it, walking backwards into the house, closing the door softly. 

When they’re alone again, John sighs. “She cut me off from them. I thought she was just jealous. I didn’t mind. But then it got worse; she started-” he clears his throat. “I said no. But that didn’t matter.”

Emori knows what he’s alluding to. Her heart hurts.

“I figured, what’s the problem? My mom was shit, so this was fine. Nothing new. And at least I had someone.”

“Someone loving you their way is better than being alone,” she murmurs. She understands.

He looks at her. The tears in his eyes scare her. “Raven and Bellamy helped me get out. I started living here and it was okay. I’m still...I’m still dealing with it though.” He laughs. It’s ugly. “Which is to say, I’m not really dealing with it.”

He pulls down the collar of his shirt, shows her the ugly scars around his neck. She touches them softly, with cold fingers. He shivers.

_ Bruised and ruined.  _ She feels sick.  _ Bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. _

“I’m sorry for what she did to you,” she whispers.

He sniffs. “It’s over now.”

“Is it?”

He laughs. “Shit. I forgot.” She doesn’t know what he means. His glassy eyes say that he doesn’t either. “No, it’s not, I guess.”

They sit there in silence. It might be her imagination, but the tension is bleeding from his shoulders. He leaves his shirt askew. Every time she sees the scars, she is angry.

“I hope it stops hurting,” she whispers.

“It does. Sometimes.” He reaches for her. She stays deathly still while he reaches out, touches her hair, her cheek that’s still sticky with spit. “I wish…” he shakes his head. “I felt guilty talking to you. As if she would be angry. As if she still matters.”

“Why me?” she asks. “You talk to Raven and Octavia all the time.”

“They-” he sighs, frustrated, out of words. “They’re not like you. They’re not… They don’t understand. You do.” He huffs out a laugh. “I don’t know how, but you do.”

It’s enough. More than enough, actually. She can feel herself smiling, glowing like the fireflies flashing in the tree branches above them.

“I’d like to take you out,” he says softly. She blinks in surprise, shifts when he turns, reaches for her hand. “I can’t promise I won’t be a shitty boyfriend. Hell, I’m not asking to be your boyfriend. I’m just asking for a date.”

It sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. “Okay.” She nods, smiles when he smiles.

“Okay?” He sounds shocked. She doesn’t blame him; she is too. She barely knows the guy. But she knows enough. She knows about his nightmares. She knows his laugh, his little smiles, his love of chocolate, his hatred of his own reflection.

She’s seen enough. Enough to say yes. Enough to pretend she has a conscience.

She takes his hand, leads him back to the house. “Okay.”


	3. Hello Darling, Sorry About That

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they’re walking home, he realizes with a start that he can’t stop looking at her. He’s pulled to her, transfixed by her - by her steady gait and the rhythm of her voice, the arch of the tattoo over her face and the way she says his name.
> 
> It fucking terrifies him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **THERE IS A DISCLOSURE OF RAPE IN THIS CHAPTER. IT IS CANON-CONSISTENT. PLEASE BE AWARE WHEN READING.**

_ Hello darling, sorry about that.  _

_ Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we  _

_ lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell  _

_ and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.  _

* * *

**Then**

_ “Who was that?” Ontari asks when Murphy hangs up the phone. She’s lounging on the couch, reading a book. Or, at least, that’s what she appears to be doing. _

_ “Raven,” he says shortly, pocketing his phone. “We’re going drinking later.” _

_ “Really?” Ontari snorts. “That’s cute. But no. You’re going to stay here with me.” _

_ Murphy shakes his head. “No. I’m going out with Raven.” _

_ Big mistake. She looks up from her book. “That’s cute, John. But wouldn’t you rather be here with me?” _

_ He can tell by her tone that she’s expecting him to cave, but he doesn’t feel like it. He wants to leave the apartment, wants to go get drunk and watch Raven dance with guys only to turn them down. He wants to get out. He wants an escape. _

_ “No.” He grabs his keys. Behind him, he hears the pillows on the couch rustle, feels her feet on the floor. “I’ll be back later.” _

_ She grabs him by the shoulders, spinning him around and pinning him to the wall. Her hands pin his arms while her lips clamp down on his like a vice. _

This is fine,  _ he tells himself.  _ This is good enough.

* * *

Their first date is a near disaster.

It goes like this: he puts on a button-down and a tie. He takes the tie off, leaves it draped over the bannister because it feels like a noose. He waits for Emori at the bottom of the stairs, and when she comes down wearing black leggings and a long, loose olive green tunic, he momentarily forgets how to speak.

“What?” she asks, self-conscious. He wonders if anyone has ever told her that she’s beautiful. He wonders if she would believe him or just punch him in the face.

He chances it. “Nothing. You look...you look really nice.”

She blinks up at him. Her mouth is set in something that isn’t quite a fine line, but an expression of disbelief nonetheless. “Thank you,” she says quietly. The fingers of her smaller hand tighten on the bannister. 

It goes like this: he drives them to a restaurant on campus. He wants to order a beer but doesn’t. Emori makes him order for both of them because her taste in food extends as far as the grocery offerings at 7-11. He gets her a steak and fries and himself a hamburger.

“Isn’t steak expensive?” she asks, frowning.

Murphy shrugs. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had steak. Trust me.”

She plays with the shiny silver knife next to her plate and chews on her lower lip. Something is bothering her but he’s afraid to ask. Or should he? Is she hinting at it? Will she be mad if he doesn’t ask what’s wrong?

He chances it again. “Everything okay?”

She looks up at him. Her eyes are dark, endless, unreadable. “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

Her fingers twitch. He can feel the tablecloth shift with her bouncing leg. She’s nervous, he realizes, and that does something to ease the knot in his stomach.

“Hey.” He reaches for her smaller hand. He wishes he could see her left hand again. “It’s just me. We’re just hanging out. It’s okay.”

She sighs, turns her palm over, wraps her fingers around his, squeezes his hand. “I know. I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t have to apologize.”

The conversation is easier after that. They steer clear of heavy topics like what she was doing in prison and why he can usually be caught day-drinking before and after classes. She tells a story about the time she was determined to learn how to change a car tire at age ten. He can’t hide a proud grin when she pronounces the steak “the best thing she’s ever eaten.”

The darkness is still there, though. It starts off small, just a flicker in her eyes, and grows and grows, until it turns her amber gaze to dark brown. He still doesn’t ask. She doesn’t bring it up, just smiles and laughs and chews on her lip when she thinks he’s not looking.

It goes wrong, and it goes like this: as they’re walking home, he realizes with a start that he can’t stop looking at her. He’s pulled to her, transfixed by her - by her steady gait and the rhythm of her voice, the arch of the tattoo over her face and the way she says his name.

It fucking terrifies him.

He had been enamored by Ontari, too. He couldn’t look away from her; she was like a force of nature, powerful in her ruthlessness, and insistent in her demands, whatever they might be. He hadn’t loved her for it, but he had deferred to her because of it. And when she showed interest in him, he hadn’t said no.

He never said no. He knew it wasn’t worth it.

So when he looks at Emori, he feels the old familiar dread well up in him. And he only fucks up the date at the end, when she’s standing mid-way up the stairs, looking down at him, asking, “Are you coming up?”

“No!” he says loudly, sharply. She flinches, looks at him with questioning eyes. He looks at her and sees the wavering image of Ontari’s demanding face, the insinuation that there was no denying her. He blinks, and it’s Emori, all soft hair and gentle eyes and  _ damn it,  _ he doesn’t know what he wants, but it’s not this. It’s anything but this. 

“John, it was just a question,” Emori says. His name tastes like dirt coming from her lips.

“It’s never just a question,” he explodes. “You always want something; you  _ never  _ listen when I say no, when I-”

He feels the dread wash over him as he looks up at her. She’s just Emori now, and she’s looking at him as if he’s just punched her in the stomach.

“I didn’t mean it,” he stammers. “It- that wasn’t meant for you. I’m sorry.”

She sits down on the step. “Who was it meant for?”

Her voice is gentle, forgiving. It makes him want to cry.

He plants one foot on the step. “Ontari.”

“The one that showed up the other night,” she murmurs. “The one who never let you say no.”

He nods. “She…” he sighs. He can’t say it. It’ll burn like vodka does when it’s coming up the wrong way, like it has all the nights he’s spent throwing up because the nightmares won’t stop.

But maybe there’ll be the relief that comes after, the emptiness that comes from purging. Maybe he’ll sleep through the night if he says it out loud.

He studies Emori’s eyes. They’re dark again, and they call to him.  _ I understand _ , he hears them say.  _ I understand, and I’m sorry. _

He hopes she doesn’t understand from experience.

“She raped me,” he whispers, and his stomach does a slow roll. “She raped me for almost three years.”

“John.” Her voice breaks. She swallows, reaches out her left hand for him.

It’s a gesture.  _ I’m damaged, and you are too. I understand. I understand. _

He takes it, kneels on the step below her, reverently unwraps the cloth that hides her hand from view. Doing something with his hands makes this all easier. “It wasn’t just that.” He laughs derisively. “She cut me off from everyone, made me think I was crazy for wanting anyone but her. I didn’t think I could have any better, so I stayed. We moved in together so I could get away from my mom. If she had thrown me out, where would I have gone?”

“It was a survivor’s move,” Emori murmurs.

Her hand is fully unwrapped now. He runs his fingers over the scarred and broken skin. “I get why you cover this up,” he says, that old familiar fever dream-feeling coming over him. It’s just her and him and a night moving like a whirlwind.

The stairs creak under his knees. He can hear her swallow. When he looks up, her pupils are blown, black swallowing brown.

“I get why you cover this up,” he says again, and she shivers. “But it’s so damn beautiful. I wish you wouldn’t.”

Her lips part. He once compared them to Ontari’s, but they’re nothing like hers. They’re fuller, softer, more enticing than he ever thought they would be.

“Can I do better?” he asks her suddenly. “Do I deserve something other than what she gave me?”

“You deserve everything,” she tells him. The conviction in her voice nearly brings him to tears.

“I want to kiss you,” he blurts out. “I want to kiss you, and it’s fucking terrifying. I want to fall in love with you, but I’m not sure that I can.”

She leans forward, rests her free hand on his cheek. “It’s okay, John.” She smiles, soft and sad. “I’ll wait.”

She stands, pulls him to his feet and tugs him up the stairs and to his room. She touches his arm and says a soft “goodnight.” He watches her go and locks his bedroom door behind her.

He’s hot and cold all over, dizzy and aching. It’s the fever dream, he tells himself as he takes off his shirt and runs his hands through his hair. He needs to stop this, needs to get a handle on himself before he does something he’ll regret.

When his hands stops shaking, he flings his door open and takes two steps into the hallway to knock on Emori’s door.

“It’s open,” she says, her voice soft, nonchalant. He opens the door, and she’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, her face turned toward the open window. He sees fresh tears on her cheeks. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I ruined everything.”

“No,” she says, a half-sigh, and reaches for him. “No, you didn’t.”

He sits beside her, his back to the wall, his fingers tangled with hers. Her wrap dangles from the fingers of her left hand. He trails his eyes over the bumps and ridges of the welded fingers and feels a surge of affection for the claw-like appendage.

“You should get a tattoo,” he blurts quietly.

She looks at him, brow quirking. “Another one?”

He nods. “On your hand.”

She frowns. “I have one already.” She raises her left hand, turning it over so he could see the faint ink on the back of it, near where her wrist meets her arm. It’s a string of ones and zeros, interrupted by a thick dark scar.

“Binary code,” she explains. “It means ‘bad code’.” 

Murphy doesn’t like that. “It’s not bad. It’s part of who you are.”

She smirks. “Maybe I am bad.”

When he looks at her, her eyes sparkle with mischief and sadness. “I don’t think so,” he says, touching the scar around her wrist. “Anyway, you should get something different. Something badass.”

She lets out a thoughtful hum, then tips her head back against the wall. A breeze ruffles her hair. He hears the slamming of car doors, the voices of Jasper, Monty and Harper. Outside, the grass behind Raven’s house stretches for miles. It looks like a meadow.

“Tell me something about you,” he says softly. Behind him, he hears the rustle of her tunic as she stands. “Something I should know.”

He hears her sigh rattle in the back of her throat. “There’s nothing you  _ should _ know,” she says, a wry twist to her mouth. “What do you want to know?”

He stares down at the lawn. Jasper and Monty are sitting under the ancient, half-dead tree that’s been there for nearly a century. Monty squints up at the house and gives Murphy a little wave.

“Answer for an answer,” he tells her, then, “What are you most afraid of?”

“Not being wanted,” she says after a moment. “What is your favorite thing?”

“Sleep.” He grins when she laughs. “Who is someone you will always love?”

“My brother,” she murmurs. “Who’s someone you’ll always hate?”

“Myself.”

She blinks at him. “John…”

He shakes his head. “Don’t.” His hands tingle from where they’re clenched on the windowsill. He releases them, and the blood flows back to his fingertips.

“Who’s someone you’ll always hate?” he parrots her question.

She looks at him. Her eyes are very brown. Her skin looks soft. It looks warm.

“My brother,” she says softly.

“Do you feel bad about it?” he asks. He wants to lift his hand, touch his knuckles to her cheek. The room feels too small. She is surrounding him slowly, like a bad dream.

She nods. “I don’t want him to hate me,” she whispers. The space between their bodies vibrates.

“I don’t think he could ever hate you,” he says, reaching for her hands. She lets him hold them, lets him lift her bigger one to his chest and leave it there. “I don’t think anyone could hate you.”

She huffs out a laugh. It’s the loudest thing in the room. “You don’t know much about me, John Murphy.”

“Maybe not,” he concedes. “But I want to learn.”

She tilts her head. The sunset is fading, darkening the room. “Why?”

_ Because you’re beautiful,  _ he wants to say. _ Because you have a nice smile, and you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. Because you’re badass enough to carry a knife in your boot.  _ _ Because I look at you and want to be touched, want to be wanted. _

He says nothing.

She sighs, gets up on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you,” she whispers against his skin. She tugs her hands from his grasp and leaves her room, propping the door open. There’s something implicitly trusting in that action. He watches how closely she guards her things and feels honored and terrified that she allows him to be alone with literally everything she owns.

He swears once, then again, and moves from the window to his bed, flopping backwards and letting out a harsh groan.

_ Shit. _

* * *

He wakes up some time later, and Emori is screaming.

He stands in the doorway of her room, drifting closer, step by painful step, a strange sense of deja vu washing over him.

“Emori?” He shakes her shoulder. Her skin is warm, a little damp from sweat. “Emori, wake up.” She’s curled into herself, shaking and crying, teeth gritted against some invisible pain. “Emori,  _ please-” _

“No!” she shouts, jerking awake suddenly, striking him hard with her smaller hand. She turns to him, eyes wide, frantic, and her face falls as she takes him in. “John, fuck, I’m so sorry-”

“It’s okay.” He shakes his head, touches his cheek. He can feel a bruise start to form. “You hit hard,” he complains.

She sniffs. When she turns on the tiny lamp at her bedside, he sees tears rolling freely down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

He moves to sit at the edge of her bed. “Don’t be.” He looks down at her. For a moment, their roles are reversed; he’s the one left at the mercy of his bad dreams, and she’s comforting him through the panic and fear. “Raven has a mean right hook. I’ve been on the receiving end of that enough times to build up an immunity.”

Her lips quirk up. An immense relief floods through him. She’s not angry. She’s okay. This is okay. He touched her and didn’t want to recoil. He made her laugh and didn’t want to die because of it.

“You can stay,” she murmurs as she turns her face toward her pillow. “If you want.”

He slides off the bed and sits on the floor, leaning against her mattress with his head near her outstretched hand. “Go to sleep, Emori,” he murmurs.

She nods, brushing her hand over his cheek, and, with a soft sigh, drifts off.

There’s something vulnerable about her like this, face slack with sleep, tears still drying on her skin because he wasn’t brave enough to wipe them away. Murphy looks away from her peaceful face, back at the floor. The dawn casts shadows over the worn wood. He watches them dance in the wind, then looks up when he feels a breeze over his hair. She’s left her window open, he realizes, but when he gets up to close it, he can  _ feel  _ her eyes spring open.

“Don’t,” she says, voice fragile. “I want it open.”

Her eyes are dark, soft and sad the way they were on the stairs. He backs away from the window and sits beside her again. She cards her smaller hand through his hair, sighing as she turns toward him. He leans his cheek against the mattress and watches her.

“You’re pretty,” she tells him softly, smirking softly when he rolls his eyes. “But prickly.” She runs her fingers over the stubble on his cheeks.

She touches his cheek again, softer this time. He feels the ache of the bruise setting into his skin. The look in her eyes morphs from sleepy ease to brutal self-hatred. “I bruised you.”

He doesn't understand. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yes, it is,” she says sharply, propping herself on her elbow. “I bet you said it wasn’t when she hurt you.”

He did, but that’s beside the point. 

“I’m fine.” He catches her hand, guides it back to his cheek. “I’m fine, Emori.”

Her eyes flicker between disbelief and trust. They settle on trust, and he breathes out a sigh of relief.

He falls asleep like that, with his head against her mattress and her fingers tangled in his hair.

* * *

“How was the date?” Raven asks, accosting Murphy the second he stumbles downstairs the next morning, desperately needing coffee.

“For fuck’s sake, Raven, let me wake up first,” he grumbles without bite, grabbing Raven’s mug that says “World’s OKAYEST Engineer,” a gift from Monty last Christmas.

Raven perches on a stool near the counter and crosses her arms, waiting exactly thirty seconds before asking again, “How was it?”

“It was fine,” he says after a minute. He feels the ghost of her fingers in his hair, tastes the sourness of the words he hurled at her, sees the understanding in her eyes he wants to hide from and keep forever. “It was fine.”

Raven quirks an eyebrow at him. “You came out of her room.”

“Shut up,” he grumbles, feeling his cheeks heat. Raven laughs, and the sun peeks in the kitchen windows. A creak on the stairs catches his ear, and he turns to see Emori leaning against the bannister.

“You can come down,” he tells her quietly. She smiles, and he feels the warmth in his cheeks pool in his gut.

Maybe there is hope, after all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise there won't be as much of a delay between chapters. Tell me what you think here or on [Tumblr](http://infernalandmortal.tumblr.com)


	4. Dear Forgiveness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You do,” he murmurs. The kindness in his voice makes her swallow hard. She remembers another day, another sunlit room, John’s earnest insistence that she was something, and she aches.
> 
> “Ask me,” she whispers. His eyes dart over her face, drop down to her mouth, back up to her eyes. One of his hands reaches up to stroke her cheek. “Ask me, John.”
> 
> “Can I kiss you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, it's a miracle - I wrote fluff. Well, not a lot of fluff, but a little bit. Enjoy. And also, sorry for,,,,literally all of this.

_Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently  
_ _we have had our difficulties and there are many things  
_ _I want to ask you.  
_ _I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have  
_ _these luxuries._

* * *

**Then**

_Emori hates being restrained._

_She can feel the cuffs around her wrist, heavy and cold on her right, dull against the scar on her left. The holding cell is strangely quiet, so she can hear every rattle of the chain as she twitches in discomfort._

_“They left them on you?” Otan asks through the bars. Emori turns to look at him, relief flooding her features. “Fucking figures.”_

_“Can you get me out or what?” Emori asks through bared teeth._

_“What’d they get us on?”_

_“Baylis,” she mutters, and Otan groans, thumping his head against the bars. “They think I had something to do with it.”_

_“You did,” Otan retorts._

_Emori quirks an eyebrow at him. “You killed him, and you know it.”_

_“Not so loud!”_

_“They’ll understand,” Emori continues. “They’ll know it was self-defense, that-”_

_“Do you really fucking think they’ll even give me a trial with my long list of priors?” Otan says, his tone somehow both mocking and afraid. “If I go to jail again, you know I’m not getting out.”_

_They stare at one another for a long moment before the desk officer calls him away. Emori feels the ghost of someone else’s blood on her hands, even though it was never there to begin with._

* * *

Emori is in a lecture when she gets the call.

It’s from a blocked, encrypted number, and since there’s only one person she knows who can do that, she gets her hopes up almost immediately.

And then she’s back in the visiting room, her feet propped on the chair in front of her. She looks bored, insolent even, but she’s not; she’s waiting for someone that will never show up. The air is cold, and her heart is colder still; she misses him, and she hates him all at once.

“Otan?” she asks as soon as she picks up, clicking the classroom door closed behind her to hide from her classmates’ prying eyes.

“Em.” He sounds surprised. Fondness rises in her, crushing the anger. “I didn’t think you’d pick up.”

Emori can feel herself smiling. Despite everything, when she she hears his voice, all she has to do is blink and she’s home again, standing in the kitchen snacking on junk food while he strips the hard drive of a laptop stolen from some businessman. The scars on his cheek and neck are vivid red, but his eyes are gentle when he scolds her - _Em, quit it. That’s not real food_ \- and she would stick her tongue out and remind him that it’s all they had.

“I missed you,” she whispers before she can stop herself. “Can you come see me?”

“No.” His voice is hard.

Emori feels the softness in her voice calcify. Her voice hardens. “Why not?” she asks. There’s hurt seeping into her voice. She can practically feel the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “Didn’t you miss me?” She pauses. “And how the hell did you get this number, anyway?”

“I know people,” he says. “And I did miss you.”

He doesn’t sound sincere. Emori balls her bad hand into a facsimile of a fist. The bulletproof glass that separates them is heavy against her words. “You have a fucking funny way of showing it.”

“Em-”

“No,” she interrupts. “You don’t get to call me and not have the first word out of your mouth be anything but an apology.”

Otan sounds stung when he replies. “You took the deal, not me.”

“Because I didn’t want to flip on you!” she hisses, turning her face to the wall as two students mosey past. “I did what I had to do to protect you. Like I always do. And you thanked me by leaving me there.”

“And whose choice was that?” Otan snaps back. Emori feels the knot in her stomach contract.

“Fuck you,” she hisses. “And don’t call me again. I got out _alone_ . I go to college. I moved on. _Alone._ And I want to keep it that way.”

It hurts to say that. It feels like she’s losing a part of herself, unmooring herself from safety in the name of long-term self-preservation. She doesn’t want to, but she needs to.

“You didn’t come to see me,” she whispers, a last-ditch attempt at purging this anger inside her. “You didn’t come for me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t sound sorry.

Emori hangs up and sags against the cold brick wall, sliding down to rest on her heels. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, eyes staring blankly ahead, before the classroom door opens again.

“Are you alright?”

Emori looks up to see the graduate assistant standing over her. She thinks his name is Lincoln. He’s staring down at her with a mixture of concern and apprehension, as if he wants to ask, but knows the question might not be welcome.

She runs her good hand over her face. “I’m fine. Sorry, I’ll go back in.”

“Just wait a minute,” he says, lowering himself to sit beside her. “I know when people are lying. It’s none of my business exactly what’s going on, but if you want to talk, I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”

Emori studies him out of the corner of her eye. Faking neutrality obviously wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Neither was being hostile. As far as he was concerned, she’s just a normal student. Or something.

“I was in jail,” she says quietly, relieved when his expression doesn’t shift out of neutrality. “And my brother used to come see me, but he stopped. Which hurt, because he was the only one I had. He called me just now, and I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore because he left me.”

Lincoln is still looking at her, face not revealing anything. Emori feels as though something is squeezing her heart. “We grew up on the streets. I depended on him.”

“Is he the reason you were in jail?” Lincoln asks after a moment.

Emori stares at him. The word _yes_ is on the tip of her tongue, but she can’t say it. She can’t make herself put the blame where it belongs.

“It’s what you do,” she murmurs, picking at the dead skin on her bad hand under her wrap. “You do what you have to do to survive. To protect each other.”

“You took the fall for something he did,” Lincoln guesses. Emori looks at him. The fist around her heart tightens. “That was...brave of you.”

Emori shakes her head and struggles to her feet. She leans against the wall and waits until Lincoln leaves and students stream from their lecture halls and classrooms, walking to and fro, distracted and distanced. The longer she stays still, the more she wants to move.

Once her classroom is empty, she ducks inside to collect her backpack, then nearly sprints home, dodging meandering packs of students and idling cars. When she bursts through the door of Raven’s house, she nearly gives Jasper and Monty, who are laying on the living room floor, a heart attack.

“Dude!” Jasper yelps, jumping to his feet, nearly knocking his head on the coffee table. “What’s wrong?”

The bang of a kitchen cabinet startles her. “Emori, what-?” John is standing in the middle of the kitchen, his shoes on and untied, his hair an ungodly mess. For a moment, just a split second, really, her heart softens at the sight of him. Even now, two weeks after their date, she still looks at him and sees him vulnerable and asleep on her floor.

“What’s wrong?” he asks her, and she finally has the answer to her restlessness. Why is she not surprised that it’s him?

She grabs his keys, tosses them to him. He catches them with a look of surprise. “Let’s go,” she says.

“Where are you two going?” Raven asks, coming out of her room with an empty water bottle in one hand and her phone in the other.

“Out,” Emori nearly snaps.

Raven trades a look with John, then ruffles his hair. “Comb this,” she tells him. He smooths it back into place and ignores her. Jasper and Monty watch with wide eyes and nearly identical frowns.

Emori inclines her head towards the door. “Let’s go.”

John follows her without complaint, and Raven locks the door behind them both. “What’s going on, Emori?” he asks, stopping on the bottom porch step to tie his shoes.

“I can’t stay here,” she says, not looking back. “I can’t be here right now.”

“Okay,” John says, running to catch up with her. “But I’m gonna need a bit more than that before I go peeling out of here.”

She snatches his keys out of his hand. “That was just to avoid grand theft auto. I’m driving.”

* * *

 

She realizes where she’s going about three seconds before she actually gets there.

“Where are we?” John asks as she shifts the car into park and stares up at the vandalized, dilapidated apartment building. There’s a notice on the chain-link fence that lists a date six months ago the structure should have been demolished.”

“This is where I grew up,” she says. “For the first few years, anyway.” She allows John a moment to take it all in, then points to the dumpster in the alley. “That’s where Otan found me.”

“You were- um, why?” John sounds horrified. She doesn’t blame him.

She pulls her wrap off. “This.”

John looks stricken and angry, the righteous combination she first saw when they played their little truth-for-truth game. He’s not shocked at the sight of her hand, not anymore, but he is angry at her declaration.

“ _What_ the _fuck_?”

Emori covers her hand back up. “Come on,” she says, anger and desperation still running through her veins. “Let’s go.”

John follows her up the walk, past the broken glass and trash in the front yard, through the destroyed entryway with its smashed metal mailboxes and broken fire extinguisher panel, up the damaged back stairs and out into the third-floor hallway.

“This was us,” she says bitterly, rapping on a door half off its hinges. John steps inside, and she follows. That heart-strangling feeling is back again. She hates it.

He wanders off, but she stays put. This was a bad idea, if her racing heart has anything to say about it, but she’s determined to stay, to kill all the ghosts that have followed her from these walls.

“You had a life here,” she hears John say. He sounds surprised, as if he was expecting something much more pitiful than this ruined home, condemned to death or something much worse.

She rounds the corner where the living room turns into the bedroom and sees him staring at the closet door, where the height of a growing Emori was charted out in pencil on the frame. “He cared about you.”

She doesn’t say anything, just shuffles over to his side and stares along with him. He did care about her once, she thinks, and she wants to believe he cares about her still. That he’s only leaving her for a little while, that he’ll be back once his restless, optimistic nature has run its course.

“I was always the smart one,” she mutters, and John snorts. “Hey!” She shoves him with her shoulder. “I was! I kept us alive. He got us what we needed, and I made sure we used it right.”

“You were a team.” It’s a statement, curiosity mixed with longing and a little loneliness.

She nods. Something is choking her; there’s a lump in her throat that won’t go away no matter how hard she swallows. The only alternative is tears, and she’s not ready for that, not yet. She has always been the betrayer, never the betrayed.

She means to say more, but the tears come: fat, ugly things that roll over her cheeks and drip onto the impossibly dusty floor. She hides her face in her hands and sobs, leaning her forehead against the doorframe, a full two feet above the final height marking.

“He left me,” she chokes out. “It was his fault, but I lied. I said it was me so he wouldn’t go to jail.”

John rests a tentative hand on her shoulder, right between her shoulder blades. She can feel his warmth seeping into her, a handprint on her skin. “Emori…”

“Don’t,” she growls. He shuts up, but doesn’t take his hand away. “I made my choice.”

“Doesn’t make it easy,” he murmurs. “Doesn’t make it hurt less.”

She looks up and lets him tug on her shoulder, pulling her to face him. He rests his hands on her upper arms and stares at her, down into her eyes. She feels a different knot curl in her stomach, one far more dangerous and desperate.

“What’s that poem you have taped to your wall?” she asks softly. “The one with the phrase ‘ _bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing_ ’. There’s a part in it about forgiveness, about not having the luxury of help.” John nods in recognition. “That was us. No one wanted us, and no one would help us. No one we trusted, anyway.”

A memory rises, and she shoves it away, feeling her whole body shudder. _We don’t trust_ , she had always told Otan. _We don’t trust so we don’t die._

He had trusted anyway. Idiot that he was, his blind faith had nearly gotten them killed.

She looks at John again. His eyes are dark, his pupils too wide for the sun-bathed room. His lips are parted slightly, and she lets her eyes travel down to them, memorizing the bite marks in the worn skin.

“‘Dear Forgiveness’,” he whispers. She can feel his breath on her face, warm and gentle. “‘You know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you’.”

“‘I am still talking to you about help’,” Emori says back. “‘I still do not have these luxuries’.”

“You do,” he murmurs. The kindness in his voice makes her swallow hard. She remembers another day, another sunlit room, John’s earnest insistence that she was something, and she aches.

“Ask me,” she whispers. His eyes dart over her face, drop down to her mouth, back up to her eyes. One of his hands reaches up to stroke her cheek. “Ask me, John.”

“Can I kiss you?”

The world stops. She breathes in, out, then nods slowly, so slowly. There are demons standing between them, Ontari and her own she can’t quite name, but they’re made of nothing more than air. She stands still and lets John gently slant his lips over hers, opening her mouth to the tentative press and slide of his rough skin. She wraps her arms around his neck and sighs when he winds his around her waist.

“John,” she breathes when he pulls away and rests his forehead against hers. When she lifts her eyes to his, he’s smiling.

“I want to do that again,” he murmurs, then laughs once, short and harsh. “I never thought I’d say that.”

She gets up on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to his smiling mouth. “Me too.”

His skin is warm under her fingers, from the sun or his nerves, she can’t tell. “You have to forgive him,” he murmurs. “You have to forgive yourself.”

She looks up at him, her lips quirked up. “Easy for you to say.”

He huffs out a laugh, resting his forehead against hers. Eventually she leans against the door frame, right by the pencil markings, and lets him come closer and closer. They don’t kiss; they just stand there, breathing each other’s air, eyes closed. There’s no fear in his closeness, only safety, and she feels a keen coldness when he pulls away at the sound of sirens outside.

“We’re trespassing,” he says, as if either of them care. “We should get out of here.”

Emori laughs, following him out the ruined apartment and broken stairs. He holds the car door for her like a gentleman and drives like hell is chasing them.

It’s only when they pull into the driveway at home that Emori realizes she doesn’t feel the need to run anymore.

* * *

 

Something restless buzzes under her skin as she sits across the table from John. He’s poring over a homework assignment, and she’s trying and failing to draft an essay. The tiny laptop she borrowed from Raven has keys too small for her bad hand, so she’s typing one painstaking word at a time with her dominant hand.

She’s so engrossed in trying to hold a thought while typing about ten times slower than her mind races that she nearly jumps out of her skin when John’s hand rests atop her bad one.

“Is this okay?” he murmurs, barely looking up. Like in the apartment, she feels his hand burning through the wrappings around her hand.

She nods, swallows, and answers, “Yes.” He squeezes her hand once and falls silent.

Raven, Monty and Octavia clatter their way into the kitchen with groceries, Bellamy and a tall, wavy-haired girl in tow. She half-expects John to pull his hand away, but he doesn’t, even when Raven leans over John and alternates looking pointedly at them and their hands until he looks up.

“Can I help you?” he asks drily.

“No,” Raven says cheekily, limping back into the kitchen. Bellamy and Octavia exchange a look that only siblings could give one another. Emori feels her heart plummet into her stomach.

She must shift or something because John looks up at her. “You okay?”

She nods, then frowns down at the laptop again. “Writing essays is a pain in the ass.”

“Here,” John pulls the laptop towards him. “Tell me what to write.”

She blinks at him. He raises his hands in surrender. “I’m not saying you’re incapable. I’m just trying to help.”

She relents by slumping back in the chair. John reluctantly releases her hand and, with a soft sigh, listens as she dictates. The words come out choppy and disjointed, too formal and academic on her tongue, but John listens and types and occasionally asks if he can reword things, and she finds she doesn’t mind this way of writing.

When Bellamy asks them if they want any pizza, Emori’s stomach growls in response, but she still says no because her money is running out fast.

John kicks her lightly under the table. “Yeah, we’ll take some,” he tells Bellamy, then kicks her again when she opens her mouth to protest.

“They don’t make you pay for it,” Monty tells her quietly as he makes himself comfortable at the head of the table, three textbooks stacked near his elbow. “We all kinda feed each other and never keep a tab. It’s easier that way.”

Emori nods and gives the kid a small smile, which he returns with enviable ease. The wild-haired girl from earlier perches on the stool Raven keeps pushed under the kitchen counter and stares at Emori with bright, haunted eyes.

“Oh, you haven’t met Luna yet,” Raven says. “She used to live here, but she traded down to grad housing.”

“‘Trading down’ is debatable,” Luna says drily. “You’re forgetting all the times you and Lexa stole my food. At least I have some peace in my tiny little dorm.”

Emori doesn’t miss the fond way Luna looks at Raven, who seems all-too-oblivious to her gaze. “It’s nice to meet you. I think you moved into my old room,” she says to Emori. Her voice is low, even, and almost pleasant, but there’s something guarded in her tone, as if there’s a wild thing inside her she’s trying to keep caged.

John closes up the laptop and shoves Monty’s books aside when Bellamy comes through the door bearing three pizza boxes and a carton of ice cream.

“I wasn’t done!” Monty complains at the same time Jasper barrels down the stairs screeching about his _desperate need for sustenance_. Lexa heads off what Emori is sure will be a noise complaint when she barges through the front door and, with no preamble, announces, “Everyone needs to shut up; my girlfriend’s here.”

That’s enough to halt all movement.

“Your...what?” Octavia asks. Emori can’t help but grin at the reactions: Raven’s delighted smile, Bellamy’s stunned expression, Luna’s confused glare, Jasper and Monty’s silent exchange of money.

A slim dark-haired girl closes the door behind her and drops her backpack and a camera case on the floor. “Do I take my shoes off or leave them on?” she asks Lexa in a low voice, obviously uncomfortable with the shameless way Raven, Monty and Jasper are staring at her.

“You can leave them on,” John says. “We gave up on these floors a long time ago.”

John’s flippant acceptance is enough to ease the tension. Lexa introduces her as Costia, a second-year photojournalism student, and she’s immediately folded into the makeshift family Emori is still struggling to call her own.

John passes Emori a piece of pizza, then gives her a kiss on the cheek before turning around to get his own. It’s a sudden moment, but she holds it close to her chest as the entire room starts cheering and catcalling. Raven sidles up next to her and nudges her arm.

“Be careful with him,” she says softly. “And make sure he’s careful with you.”

Emori looks at John, who’s nursing a beer and listening to Jasper ramble about something. When he meets her eyes, his cheeks flush, but his smile only grows.

She could get used to this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Megan](http://bombshellsandbluebells.tumblr.com) is incredible and edited this entire thing, so please tell her you love her bc, without her, there would be no Litany.  
>  Also, please tell me what you think about this fic either here or on [Tumblr](http://infernalandmortal.tumblr.com). Also, I take fic requests :)


	5. Moment of Epiphany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A second pair of headlights joins the first. Murphy turns, half-expecting to see Bellamy’s car, but it’s an unfamiliar truck, rusty and creaking as its owner jumps down from the cab.
> 
> Emori tenses in his arms. “Mori, it’s fine-”
> 
> But she’s not listening; she launches out of his arms and approaches the driver, snarling, “What the _fuck_ did I say?” in the deadliest, angriest tone he’s ever heard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Megan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/interlude) just posted the cutest best Memori treasure hunt AU **GO READ IT**

_ Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,  _

_ in gold light, as the camera pans to where  _

_ the action is,  _

_ lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see  _

_ the blue rings of my eyes as I say  _

_ something ugly.  _

_ I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,  _

_ and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way. _

* * *

 

**Then**

_ “Get the fuck out of my way!” _

_ Murphy hears Raven yelling from the doorway before he actually sees her. Her loud voice is murder on his hungover ears, but he sits up anyway, blearily staring at her as she tries to shove past Ontari. _

_ “J!” she shouts. “Let’s go!” _

_ “Where do you think he’s going, exactly?” Ontari snaps. _

_ Murphy struggles to his feet. “Ontari, get away from her,” he says, and the fear coursing through his veins makes this all that much easier. “I’m leaving, you crazy bitch, and I’m never coming back.” _

_ “Like hell you are,” Ontari snarls. _

_ Murphy grabs the duffel bag he hid behind the couch last night before he succumbed to the temptation to finish off his bottle of vodka. “Like hell I’m not.” _

_ “You piece of sh-” Ontari starts to say. She’s cut off by Raven’s palm connecting with her cheek. _

_ “Fuck you,” Raven hisses. Murphy shoves past the both of them and makes it to the elevator before throwing up in a nearby trash can. _

_ The slam of the door makes him want to cry. He doesn’t until he gets into Raven’s car. _

* * *

 

**Now**

They all drive to the lake after classes end one Friday. It’s the only natural body of water anywhere near the city, and while it’s not warm enough to swim, the chilly late September breeze isn’t enough to deter them from setting up a grill and picnic blanket and taking over the abandoned beach with an ill-fated game of volleyball.

Raven sits on the sidelines, a thick textbook propped on her good leg, the pages flapping in the breeze every time she moves her hand to brush hair out of her face. Murphy sits beside her, watching the grill. Monty, Jasper, Octavia, Lexa, Luna and Costia have organized a three-on-three volleyball game that is failing spectacularly due to the fact that only Luna, Lexa and Octavia have any coordination. Farther away, Emori walks near the water, her boots dangling from her good hand.

Murphy watches her go, follows the way the wind whips through her hair. Her existence is like a hangnail: painful in its insistence, but the ache is dull and welcome. He’d rather not think about why.

“You know what this is?” Raven asks, poking him with her elbow until he turns to look at her. She gestures with her fingers, rubbing them together. “A cockroach playing the violin.”

Murphy makes a disgruntled noise, smiling slightly when Raven cackles. The sound carries over to the volleyball game. Luna grins in her direction, then yelps when Lexa bounces the ball off the back of her head.

“Lexa!” Luna glares at her pseudo-sister, snatching the ball up. Lexa shrugs innocently. Murphy looks over at Raven, who’s back to studying, and jabs her in the arm until she looks at him.

“You ever going to hit that or…?”

Raven swats him with her notebook. “Shut the fuck up. It’s not like that.”

Murphy hums noncommittally. “Sure it’s not.”

After a minute, he leaves the burgers to slow-cook and goes to sit with Emori, who’s burying her feet in the sand and tracing absent-minded circles around her ankles with her bigger hand.

“What’cha thinking about?” he asks, sitting close enough to take her hand, far enough for her to push him away.

“How small we are,” she says nonchalantly, as if they were discussing the weather.

“Ah. So, it’s a normal Friday night.”

She laughs once, short and sweet, low in her throat. It sends shivers down his spine, but the good kind. “Something like that. I’m not a nihilist, but I can understand why some people are.”

Murphy tries to recall his first-semester philosophy class. Or, at least, the parts he didn’t sleep through. “You don’t think there’s meaning in life?”

She sighs, shrugs a little. “I do. But it’s not… I don’t think I believe that we’re meaningful. Not really. It’s just what we do that actually matters. Think about it: anyone could have discovered the law of gravity. Newton just got to it first. So what he did goes on, and his name is just the one that happens to be attached to the accomplishment.”

In the distance, the skyline rises over the lake. The impending twilight switches the skyscrapers’ lights on. They twinkle like stars, only more superficial. Murphy hates the way they drown out the sunset.

He shakes off the evening stupor, the slow, soft feelings of contentment and warmth. “What brought that on?”

“It’s nice to know that I don’t matter,” she says softly. She takes the mitt off her left hand and drops it on the sand, running her large fingers over a piece of driftwood left there to rot. “Takes the pressure off.”

“You matter,” he says, reaching for her hand. She allows him to curl his fingers around the scar bracketing her wrist. “Here, now, you matter.”

“No I don’t.” It’s practical, the way she says it, stark and disarming. “There’s nothing I add to the house by being here. Except rent money, I suppose.”

He snorts. “I mean, yeah, but there’s more than that.”

She laughs again, but it’s darker than that sweet sound from earlier. This one makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up.  _ I’ve seen things _ , that laugh says,  _ and I know how to suffer and grit my teeth against it. _

“You matter,” he says again, then steels himself against the litany of truths about to come out, none of which he guesses she’ll believe. He’s not even her boyfriend, not ‘officially,’ as Octavia put it with a certain amount of annoying superiority she definitely got from her brother, but he loves her so he’ll be damned if he lets her lie.

“I look for you on campus and get happy when I find you,” he says and the words feel clumsy, but right. “You make me smile even when everything is unbelievably shitty. I like helping you type essays and text messages even though I know you can do it yourself because it makes me feel like I can give something to the world instead of just take. I miss you when you don’t come down for dinner, and I worry too. Sometimes I stay up until your light shuts off just to make sure you’re actually getting sleep.”

He can’t look at her now. She seems caught between discomfort and something else, something that makes her shift in the sand so the hems of her jeans drag in the wet silt and her right foot is propped up in a hollow where lake water rapidly pools.

“John,” she leans forward, catching his eyes with hers. He can’t look away. He doesn’t want to look away. There’s a metaphor there, about flies trapped in amber, but her eyes are deep brown right now, heavy against the bright setting sun. “Thanks.”

He leans forward, pecks her on the lips. They feel dry, like the dry fall air. She grins, and he feels his heart drop to his stomach.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs without thinking. He almost says ‘I love you,’ but bites his tongue. He doesn’t want to scare her. He doesn’t want to scare himself.

“At least someone thinks so,” she says wryly, then hops to her feet, the motion abrupt enough to jolt him from his thoughts. “Come on. Raven’s flipping your burgers. I’m hungry.”

He looks at her retreating form, then back at the horizon, marred by the skyscrapers in the distance and the lake not-so-far. With a sigh, he follows.

* * *

When the noise of dinner dies down and the embers in the grill start fading, he lies beside her in the grass, running his fingers through the dying blades. She curls toward him, rolling over her left hand, resting her head on his shoulder. Her smaller hand crosses her body to wrap around the folds of his jacket.

“You’re warm,” she mumbles against his coat, ducking her head down past the spiked red patch on his shoulder.

“Are you cold?” he asks, fully prepared to give her his jacket, never mind that he’d be roasted for that later by Raven and Octavia and probably even Luna.

She shrugs. “Not on the outside.”

He gets it. He’s been cold on the inside for so long, he’s forgotten what it’s like to let anyone warm him up. In the past, it was Raven with her brusque, swear-word-ridden vocabulary and her singular focus on making sure he didn’t starve to death. Now he still has her, but he has Emori too.

Emori, who’s nuzzling into his shoulder gently with a soft sigh, her hair tickling his chin. When he sighs, she looks up, pockmarks denting her cheeks from the spikes on his shoulder. Raven has turned on her car’s headlights, so her face is half-hidden in shadow. She looks eerie, like a ghost or an abandoned spirit.

“What’re you thinking about?” she asks. He wants to say something, but his stomach clamps down on his words. He feels the bile of fear rise up in his throat just like it did after their first date. He sees her earnest eyes, her soft mouth and rough hands, and he’s full of terror and trepidation.

_ You could break her heart,  _ says the voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like his worst ghost.  _ You could hurt her. You could make her leave forever. _

“Nothing,” he murmurs half-heartedly, his mind racing. He’s been down this road before, but he walks the worn path again. He can’t afford to hurt her with all that he is - it would kill him to watch her slowly hate him as time went on - but he can’t bear to tear her apart either. Not yet. He wants the luxury of taking his time with her, of slowly unwrapping her layers and maybe allowing her to burrow a little deeper under his skin.

She gasps in awe as fireflies light up the sky above him, and he realizes that she may not be under his skin, but she’s definitely ensconced in his heart.

He should be angry. He’s not; he’s afraid, but he’s not angry. Not really. He just looks at her and, like always,  _ wants _ .

He’s about to say something - what, he doesn’t know - but Jasper’s whoop of delight catches the words before they roll off his tongue.

“Look!” Jasper crows, showing Emori the firefly he’s cupping gently in his hands, his face the picture of childlike eagerness. Emori sits up and grins her approval before Jasper lets the bug fly free. It swoops through the air, around and down, and lands in Emori’s hair.

“Oh,” she whispers, craning her eyes so she can see it peripherally. It looks like a tiny fairy light in her dark hair. “John, look.”

He is. He’s looking at her, her face half-lit in the glow of Raven’s headlights. He’s looking at her beautiful eyes, her small smile, her neck and the press of her sharp collarbone under her smooth skin.

He sits up and kisses her, deeper than he did beside the lake. She lets out a sharp sound and presses closer to him. The firefly flies away as her hand comes up to press against his cheek.

Murphy always expected to be reminded of Ontari the next time he kissed someone, but he isn’t this time. Emori is so different - gentle instead of demanding, careful instead of reckless - that he finds himself lost in the rhythm of her mouth and her scars and the little laugh that escapes her when he noses his way down to her jaw and throat.

“Hey, Murphy - oh! Sorry!” Luna jumps back when she sees them. Murphy lets out a frustrated groan, but Emori just laughs, tucking herself against his side in a way that makes his heart jump.

“What?” he asks, trying to sound normal, or as normal as you can when you’ve just been interrupted kissing your sort-of-girlfriend.

Luna has a strange smile on her face: lonely, happy and a little ruthless. Murphy’s reminded of why he doesn’t like her even though Raven does. “Never mind. Carry on.”

She winks at Emori, who starts laughing against Murphy’s neck. He brushes some of her hair out of his eyes and glares at Luna’s back until she’s swallowed up by shadows.

A second pair of headlights joins the first. Murphy turns, half-expecting to see Bellamy’s car, but it’s an unfamiliar truck, rusty and creaking as its owner jumps down from the cab.

Emori tenses in his arms. “Mori, it’s fine-”

But she’s not listening; she launches out of his arms and approaches the driver, snarling, “What the  _ fuck  _ did I say?” in the deadliest, angriest tone he’s ever heard.

“Emori!” Raven yells, trying to limp over to her, her footing uneven on the dirt and grass. Monty scurries to her side while Jasper runs to Emori.

Murphy scrambles to his feet and walks with Raven, but stays a few feet back. Emori’s planted her feet in a fighting stance and something in him knows he won’t be welcome. This is between her and whatever this person brought with them.

It’s a man, probably four or five years older than Emori. He’s staring her down, barely even flinching. The burn scars on his face and down his neck paint a series of gruesome shadows over his pale skin. Emori looks at him as if she knows him - as if she hates him.

“I told you to leave me alone!” She’s shouting as though they’re miles apart instead of seperated by mere inches. “I told you I didn’t need you anymore!”

“Em-” The man’s voice is guarded, nearly conciliatory.

“No!” she cries, and Murphy can see her shoulders start to tremble. “No! You went with him! You left me for him! You don’t get to come back and say you’re sorry and have it all be okay!”

“Go to her,” Raven hisses at Murphy. “She’s freaking the fuck out; go over there.”

So Murphy does, trusting Raven’s read of the situation better than his own. Jasper moves aside so he can reach for her left hand. He runs his thumb over her knuckles to calm her.

The man’s eyes move to his hand. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he growls at Murphy, taking a step forward.

“Get away,” Emori snaps, shoving him in the chest. He backs up, but there’s something almost protective in his eyes and stance that reminds Murphy of Bellamy.

“You’re her brother,” he guesses aloud. “Aren’t you?”

They both look at him, their heads moving in sync, and Murphy’s suspicion is confirmed; they look far too annoyed at their synchronicity to be anything but warring siblings.

“Who the fuck are you?” her brother asks.

“Please leave, Otan,” Emori says softly, her voice trembling. The rage has gone out of her, and all that’s left is weariness. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Then come with me.”

She shakes her head. “No. I have school.”

He snorts. “You seriously think you can graduate? You seriously think you -  _ you _ \- could be something?”

The words sting. She flinches, actually physically  _ flinches _ , and Murphy sees red. He’s about to open his mouth when Octavia beats him to it, shoving past him with her dark hair flying and her words loud and righteous.

“If you were a real brother, you’d be happy she has a good life,” she tells him, and Murphy swears Monty mutters something like ‘great, you got her started.’ “If you really loved her, you’d want her to further her education and have a better life even if you don’t like it. You’d support her no matter what, and you’d fucking apologize to her for whatever the hell it was you did to get her this angry.”

Otan looks at Octavia with a mix of derision and wariness. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“I’m not saying I’m too good for you,” Emori interjects. Her voice is strong again. “But you hurt me, and you don’t even understand. You don’t even want to fix it.”

“You made your choice,” Otan snaps and, just like that, they’re back to sparring. “I could have taken the fall and-”

“And then what?” Emori counters. “I wasn’t eighteen! I would have been alone on the streets!”

“You’ve always been fine alone,” Otan argues.

“But I don’t want to be anymore!” Emori shouts, and the entire world seems to fall silent. 

A single tear rolls down her cheek. Her left hand grips Murphy’s like a vice. He feels his heart hammering in his throat.

He wonders if this is what it was like for Raven to see him and Ontari argue every night he wanted to leave.

“Em,” Otan starts, then quiets when she steps back. Murphy can tell he knows he’s lost.

“Just go,” Emori whispers. Octavia rests a hand on her shoulder and glares daggers at Otan. “Leave me alone.”

He turns away, hiding his face until he reaches the truck. Emori watches him drive away, then buries her face in Murphy’s chest and cries like her heart is broken.

Maybe, Murphy thinks as he shushes her and wraps his jacket around her shaking shoulders, it is.

* * *

 

She doesn’t speak again until they’re in his room, perched on the ledge of his open window, sharing a cigarette.

“We lived on the street,” she says, her voice low, her eyes tired. “We slept in abandoned houses and under the bridge. We couldn’t go home because Mom would throw me out. We got good at stealing, stripping and selling tech.”

“There’s a guy - Baylis - that ran a...gang, I guess. He let us go on runs for him in exchange for food and a place to sleep. O wanted to do enough to build up his own name recognition so we could get into the trade on our own, not have to answer to anyone. But he got cocky and took some stuff he shouldn’t have. I knew he was doing it, but didn’t say anything.”

She takes another drag. Her hands are shaking. Murphy watches her blow the smoke out the open window. The cool wind ruffles her hair. His clock tells him it’s three a.m. She looks wide awake, and he doesn’t think it’s from the nicotine.

“He found out. He beat Otan, kept me locked up in a dark room. Sometimes he’d come in and-” she swallows hard and averts her eyes. Murphy doesn’t know for sure what she was about to say, but he can guess. Anger, hatred and vicarious shame vy for a place in his veins.

“Fuck him,” he hisses without meaning to.

Emori laughs, that dark sound again. “Fuck me,” she corrects, her voice harsh, her eyes sad.

She passes the cigarette to him. Her hand is warm when it touches his. She runs her right hand over her left arm. Murphy wonders if she still feels unwanted fingerprints seared into her skin.

“Otan broke in one day to get me out, said we were getting away.” Her voice starts to unravel; the steady march of her accented words stutters. “But Baylis came back early, and I didn’t- I didn’t see the knife. Otan said Baylis had a knife, but I got the gun off the table, and O shot him twice.”

She lets out a shuddering breath. “Then the cops showed up. The blood was on both of us and O hadn’t touched the gun with bare hands, but I had.” She leans her head back against the window frame. “I was stupid. I could’ve said O did it, but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t survive in jail; he’s too insensible, too much of a dreamer. And I’d be alone.”

She looks out the window. Her left hand tenses on her knee. “I couldn’t be alone,” she murmurs, almost to herself. “So…” she shrugs. “But he stopped coming to see me. Never said he was sorry either.”

“He shouldn’t have taken your protection,” Murphy says. He doesn’t know shit about being a big brother, but he knows what Bellamy would do, and it’s nothing like what Emori’s describing. “He should’ve taken care of you. And he shouldn’t have left you alone in there.”

She’s silent for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is hollow. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Okay.” He puts the cigarette out. A draft from the window blows his door open, but he doesn’t get up to close it. He can hear Raven, Luna and Octavia downstairs. They’re playing music in the kitchen and probably making a late-night snack. “Do you want to go to bed?”

“Someone’s eager,” she says, and it takes him a moment to notice the wry quirk of her lips.

“Oh, fuck off,” he says without real heat, swinging his legs off the windowsill and reaching for her hand. Someone’s turned up the music downstairs; it’s a slow, sweet song that somehow fits the chilly night perfectly.

“John,” she laughs as he pulls her toward him, spins her once, then wraps her arms around his waist. “John, what are you doing?”

“Dancing,” he murmurs against the top of her head. He remembers another life, another house, another time when his mother would have bad days and his father would waltz her around the kitchen until she smiled. He’s not half the man his father was, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t try to be.

“I can’t dance,” she says, then actually  _ giggles _ when he spins her again, then unsuccessfully tries to dip her.

“You’re doing fine.”

She snorts, resting her head on his shoulder. “Whatever you say.”

He sways with her, feeling her breath tickle his shoulder. “I’m sorry. For what you went through.”

She shrugs. “I’m okay now, aren’t I?”

He doesn’t bring up the nightmares, the flinching or the tears. She doesn’t need that. He should know. “You’re so strong,” he says instead, letting the awe creep into his voice. How could he have ever thought about losing her?

A rap on the door frame makes them jump apart. Bellamy’s standing there, looking vaguely apologetic. “Sorry,” he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Raven wanted to know if you wanted some food. She’s making popcorn and Milk Duds.”

Emori nods enthusiastically. Murphy shrugs. “Sounds good.”

Bellamy nods but continues to hover there, only speaking when Murphy cocks an annoyed eyebrow at him. “Emori, I heard what happened earlier. With your brother.”

Emori stiffens. “Oh.”

“He’s an idiot,” Bellamy says gently. “Brothers are supposed to love their sisters and protect them. We’re supposed to take care of them no matter what. And when we make mistakes, we need to apologize.”

“Damn right!” Octavia hollers up the stairs.

Bellamy rolls his eyes. “Anyway, if you need anything, I’m around. I know you have these guys and all, but…”

She nods, blinking up at him with those guarded eyes. “Thank you.”

Bellamy nods once, then disappears down the hall. The music changes to one of Raven’s favorite 80s songs. Murphy can hear Emori’s harsh breathing, can almost hear the pounding of her heart.

He doesn’t tell her he loves her, even though he does. Instead, he leads her downstairs, makes sure she drinks a glass of water, then watches her from a kitchen stool, reveling in her laughter, her soft voice and the knowledge that she was going to be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your reviews are always the best things that happen to me. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell me what you think - it really truly absolutely matters.


	6. Shut Up, I'm Getting to It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” John asks. She’s lying in bed. He’s kneeling on her floor, his cheek against the edge of her mattress. His voice is muffled, but still resigned. “I can tell when someone’s about to run. You have that look.”
> 
> She aches. Tears prickle at the back of her eyes. “He was all I had,” she says, because what else do you say to a true accusation?
> 
> “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Go tell [Megan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/interlude) you love her for editing this chapter so quickly. She's wonderful and I love her.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,  
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow  
glass, but that comes later.  
And the part where I push you  
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,  
_shut up  
_ I’m getting to it.

* * *

**Then**

Wanted,  _the online ad reads,_ roommate of any gender. Single room available in home with three women and three men (all college students), two bathrooms and a kitchen that works most of the time. College-aged preferred, older residents welcome. Must be clean and like eating and action movies. Quiet is preferred, but honestly, it's probably optional. Email Raven Reyes with questions.

_Emori clicks on the email button and waits impatiently for the site to load on the prison's shitty Wi-Fi. Her stomach knots in anxiety. Is she going to do this? Is she actually going to move in with roommates and enroll in college? Is she actually going to make a life for herself that doesn't include the only person she's ever loved?_

_Apparently so._

_She drafts a quick email telling this Raven that she's getting out of jail in a couple weeks but has already gotten into school and will have a job as soon as possible. To her surprise, she gets an answer within a couple minutes:_

Emori,  
Rent is pretty negotiable. Let me know what you can pay once your aid goes through and we'll work it out. No pressure.  
I saved your room. Don't worry about your criminal record - I won't tell anyone, and you don't have to either. I also attached a photo of us so you know who's who (from left to right: John, Monty, Jasper, Octavia, Lexa, me).  
Congrats on paying your debts to society or whatever. See you in a bit.  
-Raven

* * *

 **Now**  

Emori knows what John likes.

(Actually, she knows what men like, but since John does fall solidly into that category, despite Raven’s jokes to the contrary, she figures her assumptions are correct.)

She knows he likes it when she smiles at him and loves it when she lets him help her type out assignments or write emails. She knows he thinks the way she texts is cute, and she knows he finds her lack of culinary taste endearing, if not disturbing.

She hates it.

She doesn’t want to know what he likes. She wants to discover him the same way he’s discovering her. He actually knows things now, knows that she’ll laugh when he nuzzles her neck with his nose, knows she’ll blush when he compliments her in front of the entire house, knows she’ll smile when he kisses her on his way out the door to class.

She hates that too. Not the romantic part, but the attachment part. How dare she fall for someone? How dare she feel safe?

All of these thoughts follow her through her Saturday morning. It’s early; the sunrise is warming the kitchen and she’s the only person awake to see it. For the first time in a record three-day anti-caffeine spree, she makes herself a cup of coffee. It tastes like the morning: nice, safe and a little bitter.

There’s that word again. _Safe_. It tastes sour in her mouth and makes her clench her jaw. It feels like a lie, even though she’s pretty sure it’s not.

She’s not completely convinced, though. She doesn’t think she ever will be.

She sits on the couch with her coffee, across from the TV cart that houses a tiny collection of action DVDs and Monty’s small, rechargeable roomba that he occasionally programs to chase Raven and Jasper around the kitchen. There are dust motes dancing in the sunlight. A clock ticks from somewhere in the house.

After a couple minutes, the door just off the kitchen creaks open, and Raven limps out, reaching for the coffee pot before she even gets to the counter.

“Hung over?” Emori asks before she can stop herself. It’s been too long; she should be comfortable talking to her roommates by now, but every word she says still sinks like a stone in her stomach.

Raven nods. “It’s been too long since I actually _drank_ Monty’s moonshine,” she grumbles. “Usually I just hold a cup of it to be polite, then nurse a beer to keep Luna company.”

Raven, now bearing her own cup of coffee, plops down beside Emori and thumps her bad leg onto the coffee table. Emori looks at the space above Raven’s foot. There’s a tiredness tugging at her she’d rather not explore, but the alternative is a conversation she’s not sure she can handle.

Thankfully, Raven’s not in a talking mood. She stares off into space, eyes landing somewhere to the left of the TV. Emori watches her, the steady rise and fall of her chest, the twitch of her fingers against her leg.

“You okay?” Raven asks after a moment. “I know that fight with your brother was rough.”

Emori feels a lump rise in her throat. “I’m fine.”

She doesn’t sound like it, even to her own ears. She sounds angry and scared and as bitter as the coffee in her mug.

Raven looks at her and raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you?”

Emori bites her lip and looks down at her hands. “I don’t know.”

There’s a creak at the top of the stairs. Both girls’ heads snap up and over at the same time. John is standing there, looking mildly freaked out at their synchronicity.

“Morning,” he says after a moment, meandering down the stairs and flopping down between Raven and Emori. Emori leans her head against his shoulder, feeling the worn fabric of his grey sleep shirt against her cheek.

He reaches for Raven’s coffee cup, then, when she smacks his hand away with a disapproving glare, makes a grab for Emori’s. She hands it over willingly, smiling softly at John’s sound of delight when he swallows the warm liquid.

“Morning,” he says again, a special whisper just for her. He passes the mug back to her, brushes his fingers over her knuckles and kisses her forehead. Just like that, all her oxymoronic thoughts of safety and fear leave her. She hates how much she loves being able to snuggle into his side, but she does it all the same.

Raven looks over at the two of them and smiles. After a moment, she struggles to her feet. John looks up at her, then over at Emori.

“I’m not trying to make it weird,” Raven says casually, with one of her rare, genuine smiles not far behind. “I’m just hungry. You want pancakes?”

John grins. “You mean, do I want you to make Bellamy bring us pancakes when he inevitably comes over?”

For some reason, Raven’s chest flushes a deep red. “Um, yeah. Sure.”

Emori lifts her head. “Raven, have you found this house another unsuspecting deliveryman?”

“Or delivery _woman_?” John asks, wiggling his eyebrows.

“J, I swear to God-”

The doorbell rings. Raven goes to answer it, relieved to escape this line of questioning. Upstairs, Emori can hear several howls of protest at the sound from Jasper, Monty and Octavia. She feels John’s laughter rumbling through his chest and up to his shoulders.

She’s about to say something when his lips on her skin make her stop short. He kisses her cheek, then her temple, then her hair. “You feeling better?” he asks.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” she answers truthfully. It’s a strange feeling, this honesty. It’s so easy to believe that she is capable of transparency. Sometimes, she can even fool herself.

Raven bustles back into the kitchen. After a moment, she pauses, leans over the peninsula counter and shouts, “Get in here!”

Luna pads into the kitchen, her hands clasped in front of her, like she’s not sure where to put them.

“You could have followed me, you know,” Raven says.

Luna shrugs. “I wasn’t sure.”

“It’s a standing invitation,” John notes.

“Ah,” Luna says, and then falls silent. She perches on the stool between Raven’s room and the back door and watches Raven place a call to Bellamy, presumably for pancakes.

Luna makes Emori nervous. She’s contained, but too much so. She’s like a powder keg; the slightest spark could set her off, but Emori doesn’t know what that spark is. The scars on her knuckles suggest a violent past, a past spent doling out pain. Maybe that’s what Emori senses.

“You alright?” Luna asks her, raising her voice to be heard over Raven, who is succinctly roasting Bellamy for something or another.

“Fine,” Emori says, sharpening her voice just enough for Luna to drop the subject.

John tangles his fingers in the ends of Emori’s hair. To escape the shivers running down her spine, she leans forward to set her coffee mug on the table. Behind them, Monty and Octavia clatter down the stairs. Monty picks up his phone from the dining room table and starts thumbing through it while trying to shield the screen from Octavia’s prying eyes.

“Who’s texting you so early on a Saturday morning?” Octavia asks, dodging Monty’s flying elbow.

“Some square who didn’t party as hard as us, probably,” Raven answers.

“‘Square’?” John asks over Emori’s head. “What, are we living in the ‘60s?”

Monty snorts, but his eyes don’t leave the phone. He starts to type, and Emori clocks the small smile on his face as it grows in size and volume.

“Who are you talking to?” she asks, nearly flinching when her voice makes the room go quiet. John told her once that it only happens because they aren’t used to her speaking up, but it still makes her anxious. She’s used to flying under the radar, to being invisible by her own design.

Thankfully, Monty spares her the awkwardness. “Just someone I met,” he hedges.

Emori thinks about letting it go, but she sees the blush on his cheeks and decides to have a little fun. “Would this be that pretty little blonde you met at the bookstore last Friday? You know, the one you tried to hide from Raven and me when you saw us walk in?”

“Damn it, Emori, you weren’t supposed to tell anyone!” Raven groans.

Emori smirks. John sits up a little straighter and pulls Emori a little closer. “Come on, Green,” he says. “Spill.”

“Her name is Harper,” he says. Raven wolf-whistles, ignoring the slap on the arm from Octavia. “We met at the lab library. She’s pre-med, but for research.”

“Raven looks like she’s about to become a human exclamation point,” John whispers in Emori’s ear. She can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up in her throat.

“What’re we talking about?” Lexa asks as she and Jasper come downstairs. A third set of footsteps follow, and everyone in the room turns to gape at Costia as she makes her way into the kitchen.

“Morning,” she says softly. “May I have some coffee?”

“Damn,” Emori mutters to John. “She’s been here what? Twice? She belongs here more than I do, and I live here.”

John inhales, like he’s about to say something, but then Raven starts questioning whether or not Costia had Slept Over last night (“The capital letters are implied in the tone,” Octavia says) and Lexa starts loudly insisting that Costia just came over really early, all the while Monty just looks relieved that Raven forgot about him. Then Bellamy shows up with breakfast and the whole house dissolves into a quiet kind of chaos-slash-feeding frenzy that abruptly ceases when Raven not-so-subtly herds everyone out into the backyard, leaving Emori and John alone on the couch, curled into each other’s warmth, breathing in the silence.

“That was obvious,” he says drily. Emori snorts and reaches for his hand. He takes her bad hand and runs his fingers over the callouses near what passes for her knuckles. “You want to go out there?”

She shakes her head because she doesn’t. She actually likes this, being alone with him. It’s a strange feeling, this trust in both him and herself.

He runs a finger over the scar under her eye, then shifts so his arm isn’t thrown around her shoulders, but instead resting on the side of her face. She has to look at him now. Damn him.

She remembers standing in his room, chocolate in her mouth, their answer-for-answer game, his fear of touching her, her fear of letting him in. She compares that image with them now, their shy touches and the way his eyes flicker to her mouth every so often, and something warm spreads through her.

“I wouldn’t have been okay with this two months ago,” she tells him. When he laughs, his breath tickles her cheek.

“Me either,” he says, and his eyes go to her mouth again.

She remembers her first morning in the house, how she wanted to bite his lips, and is almost relieved that the urge is still there. He’s so beautiful, blue eyes and sleep-wrinkled shirt, soft hands and careful words.

“Can I kiss you?” she asks.

They’re back in her old apartment and she’s waiting for him to ask, but he’s not, so here she is, tossing back her own fear in favor of something stronger. Love, maybe? That’s too much to hope for. She’d settle for his vague acceptance if she thought it would get her something more than a lifetime of being alone.

“Why are you asking?” John murmurs.

They’re on the stairs and he’s explaining why she terrifies him, why anyone that wants anything from him scares him to the point of hostility. It’s not an excuse, but it’s a reason, a reason she understands.

“Because no one else ever did,” she whispers.

He moves forward and presses his lips to hers. She feels herself gasp, then lets herself sink into the feeling of his hands in her hair and on her waist, his mouth moving against hers, the tentative press of his tongue on her lower lip.

“You belong here,” he murmurs against her mouth. “You belong right here, with us.”

She sighs, reaching up to tangle her good hand in his hair as he kisses her again, soft, then hard, then soft again, as if she’s something fragile, something holy. Her shirt rides up as she reaches for him with her bad hand, and he jerks back as his fingers brush the bare skin of her waist.

“It’s okay, John,” she says, pressing a light kiss to the underside of his jaw. His stubble tickles her nose. “It’s okay.”

They stay like that for a little while, hands roaming under shirts and over skin. Emori realizes that he likes it when she ghosts her hands over his spine, that he lets out a soft groan every time she nips at his mouth. When she finally gets up the nerve to sink her teeth into his lower lip, she’s rewarded with his hands tightening on her waist and his rough, desperate voice gasping her name.

They finally break apart when the back door creaks open and Costia’s apologetic voice announces that she’s just sneaking in to use the bathroom.

“It’s okay,” John says, propping himself up on his elbow (when did they end up lying down?). His voice is still flustered and raspy. Emori feels deeply gratified at the sound. “You can tell Captain Obvious and the others to come back in.”

“He means Raven,” Emori explains to the girl’s baffled expression. Costia nods awkwardly, then disappears into the bathroom.

John kisses her forehead, looking down at her. She smiles up at him.

She remembers his shaking voice: _I want to kiss you, and it’s fucking terrifying. I want to fall in love with you, but I’m not sure that I can_.

She wonders if it still terrifies him. She wonders if he could ever love her. She wonders if she has managed to trick him into doing so, just another well-done con, or if he chose this all on his own.

Then he kisses her again, grinning like a child, and she realizes that maybe, just maybe, someone actually managed to choose her without any coercion on her part.

The thought makes her want to cry.

* * *

Somewhere between cleaning up the kitchen and doing homework, she ends up roped into a grocery shopping trip with John, Octavia, Bellamy and Raven, which is a lot more fun than it sounds, especially since Bellamy seems more and more horrified at the prospect of dragging Raven and John through Target the more time he spends in a car with them.

Bellamy splits off from them the moment they get inside, making a beeline for the books. Raven and Octavia go in search of bread and coffee, and Murphy drags Emori to the frozen vegetables.

“You have to learn to like these,” he says, pointing to the array of frozen green things. “Pick two.”

Emori glares at him. “I’m not a child, John.”

“True,” he says, probably to placate her, “but you do need to eat something even mildly healthy for a change.”

She huffs at him, but agrees, taking out two bags of frozen green beans and tossing them at John, who glares and deposits them into the cart. “Here. Healthy. What next?”

“Want salad?” he asks. Emori wrinkles her nose. “Damn it, Emori, you can’t just eat garbage from convenience stores.”

“Watch me.”

“I’d rather not.” He leads her to the tiny produce section and passes her a bag of lettuce. “Here. Just trust me.”

She lets him lead her around a while more, first to get bread and milk, then to get some chips and salsa. She sneaks a package of cookies and a frozen pizza into the cart, but John pretends not to notice. He does, however, draw the line at a bottle of Coke.

They find Bellamy near the self-checkout stations, thumbing through his phone. The second John sees him, he groans.

“Bellamy, no,” he says as Bellamy looks into their cart, then begins typing.

“Listen, there’s-”

“Bellamy, no,” Octavia says, running up with her and Raven’s cart. “No. No Cartwheel. No.”

“What’s a Cartwheel?” Emori asks John.

“It’s a coupon app that this dumbass insists on using every time we go to Target,” John explains. Behind him, Raven begins another one of her roasts, this one all about Bellamy and his “grandfather-friend tendencies.” Emori can’t help but smile.

As she follows John out to Bellamy’s car with a cart full of food - real food! - and a chest full of laughter, she thinks about all the things she never thought she could have and how close they are to her grasp at this very moment.

It’s nice, but a little disconcerting. It’s nice, but not quite nice enough to make her forget about Otan - not completely.

She stares out the window the whole ride home. It’s just as loud and obnoxious as the ride there, but she can’t find it in her to join in. She looks at John out of the corner of her eye and thinks _maybe I should break his heart._ Then, _maybe I should stop this before it all starts._ Then, _maybe all of this is more than I can handle, more than I can hold in my two hands, more than I ever deserved._

She wants out. She wants to run. She feels that same flight instinct she’s held onto since the day she was arrested. She feels the same itch that she felt the day Otan first called her, the day she took John to the place where she grew up, the day he kissed her and she actually felt like this life was something more than a hazy dream that would disappear the longer she actually lived inside it.

That’s what this feeling is, she realizes. It’s like she’s living inside a house of glass, and if she touches it, if she dares to think too much, if she dares to settle in and lean back against the wall, the whole damn illusion will shatter and she’ll find herself alone and scared on a street corner or another shitty apartment and this time there will be absolutely no safety net.

“Mori?” John nudges her gently. “You okay?”

He knows. Somehow, he must know what she’s thinking. She blinks, shakes her head, steadies her breathing. “I’m fine.”

She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She can’t.

* * *

“We need to talk,” is the first thing she says when Otan picks up the phone.

“So now you want to?” he snaps. Emori flinches as if she’s been punched. “Where was that last night?”

She hangs up.

* * *

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” John asks. She’s lying in bed. He’s kneeling on her floor, his cheek against the edge of her mattress. His voice is muffled, but still resigned. “I can tell when someone’s about to run. You have that look.”

She aches. Tears prickle at the back of her eyes. “He was all I had,” she says, because what else do you say to a true accusation?

“I know.”

“I literally owed him my life.” She sits up, props herself on an elbow and meets his eyes. “I don’t know how to feel. And I hate it.”

“I think he’s an idiot for not staying for you. For not coming back for you until it was too late. Family’s family.” He looks down and shrugs. “But what do I know?”

She reaches down and starts carding her fingers through his hair, smiling carefully when he leans into her touch with a sigh. The words _I love you_ well up in her, swift and furious, and she has to gnaw on her lower lip to keep them inside.

“You’re beautiful,” she murmurs instead. He shakes his head. She tugs on the strands of his hair just enough to make him groan. “Yes, you are.”

He looks up at her. His eyes are dark. “Question for question?”

She sighs, sits up, and scoots back so he can climb up and sit next to her. They stack her pillows against the wall and lean back. “Sure.”

“Why are you leaving?”

She blows out a breath. “I can’t stay here. This doesn’t feel real.”

John snorts. “Bullshit.”

She shakes her head. This isn’t coming out right. “This isn’t my life, John. This passivity, this easiness, this pattern of school and classes and having enough to eat - it’s all wrong. It’s not mine.”

“You mean you don’t deserve it?” He sounds guarded, but like he’s trying to understand. Emori will take what she can get.

“I don’t.” She looks up at him, willing him to understand. The ache in her chest only grows stronger. “How long until they realize what I am and throw me out? How long before I’m alone again?”

He reaches for her bad hand and begins meticulously unwrapping it. When she tries to pull away, he holds on tighter. “John…”

“Otan left you,” he says evenly, not taking his eyes off her skin, which is slowly bared to him one scar and scab and flaw at a time. He tosses off the wrap and pushes her sleeve up, turning her palm over so he can brush the worst of the scar at her wrist with his fingers. “That was his choice. Your mom threw you out,” his voice catches on the words, “and that was her stupid, fucking choice.”

He crawls over the bed and kneels near her feet. She’s still wearing her boots: ugly things with the soles wearing out. He unzips one of them and pulls it off carefully. “You did some illegal shit, and, yeah, that was your choice.” He takes off her other boot. “But Otan was right there with you. And whatever happened with Baylis, I’m guessing that wasn’t up to either of you.”

He looks at her, dead in the eyes, and there’s no chance he’ll flinch away this time. Secretly, she’s glad, even as she shrinks under his gaze. Ontari has left him, it seems, and she rejoices in his freedom, however slight and fleeting.

“It’s not your fault,” he says softly, resting his hands on her shins. She tries to look away, but he grips her legs until she turns back to him. “It’s not your fault.”

“John…” She almost laughs, she’s so uncomfortable. His words grate against her ears. She wants to run, run now, run far away before his words shake the glass walls just enough to break them all down.

“It’s not your fault,” he says again, shuffling closer on his knees. He stops and kneels beside her, close enough to kiss her, close enough to reach her. “It’s not your fault.”

“Shut up, John.” She tries for anger, but her voice trembles. She pulls her knees up to her chest. Her eyes burn. Her face is warm. Her left hand weighs a thousand pounds.

“It’s not your fault.” He rests his hands on either side of her face. A single tear falls. John wipes it away. “Do you believe me?”

She lets out a dry, choked sob and shakes her head. “You belong here,” he whispers, kissing her forehead.

“This place is not my home.”

“Hey.” He kisses her nose. “Your home is with me. Okay?”

She lets out another sob. She reaches for him, and he comes to her. He wraps her in his arms and pulls the covers over them both. He lets her cry into his chest for the second time in as many nights and then he kisses her until she’s breathless and laughing as tears dry on her face.

The bag she packed hours before stands, forgotten, in the corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think! I love your reviews (especially when you're roasting me for the angst haha).
> 
> Also, feel free to follow me on [Tumblr](http://infernalandmortal.tumblr.com) if that's your jam!


	7. Crossed Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He folds her into his arms, her forehead against his collarbone, and runs his fingers through her hair. His gentleness, his care for her is nauseating. She hates it. She loves it.
> 
> “What’s the matter, Emori?” he asks quietly. “And don’t tell me it’s nothing.”
> 
> _I’m going to leave you._ “It is. It’s nothing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Megan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/interlude) is the best editor in the world. All this fic's greatness is owed to her.

_ I take it back.  _ __  
_ The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.  _ __  
_ I take them back.  _ __  
_ Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.  _ __  
_ Crossed out.  _ __  
_ Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something  _ __  
_ underneath the floorboards.  _ _  
_ __ Crossed out. 

* * *

**Then**

_ She’s had the same nightmare every night for months. _

_ John makes it better, though. Bitter, angry John, who’s afraid of being touched, who flinches when he’s loved. He reminds her that something hard in this world could become something capable of care. _

_ She knows she can love someone. She doesn’t know if she can feel guilty for hurting them. Pain is inevitable, but she killed her conscience long ago. _

_ She loves this house, though. Loves it so much it hurts. Monty and Jasper are shoving her mattress back into place on her bed, and Lexa is prying up a floorboard with her knife. _

_ “Here,” the younger girl says, pointing. “A place to hide contraband.” _

_ “No such thing,” Jasper says, winking at Emori. “This isn’t high school.” _

_ Lexa glares at the boys. “Yeah, but what if she has something  _ private _?” _

_ Emori waits until they leave to hide nearly everything she owns under the floor. _

* * *

**Now**

She wakes up, and he’s there, curled into her shoulder, his chest pressed to her back, his breath warm against her skin. When she twists her neck, she can see him in the light from her window. He looks soft, safe and content. He looks like a different person, one whose shoulders aren’t quite so heavy. 

A sudden, swift fondness rises in her when he nuzzles into her with a tiny sigh. “John,” she whispers, without really thinking. His name feels soft and careful on her lips. She can’t help but smile when he murmurs her name, still half asleep.

She tries to get up, despite every inch of her wanting to stay. It’s Sunday, so she has time. Time to work. Time to think. Time to plan.

Her eyes go to the bag in the corner, obscured by the long morning shadows. Did John see it? She hopes not.

She should unpack, but she can’t bring herself to do it. She needs that backpack for school, but it feels as though unpacking it would give something away. She’d be closing an escape route, and she’s not sure she can do that. Not yet. 

“Mori,” John mumbles when she stirs. He clutches her tighter. “Don’t go.”

Her heart nearly leaps from her chest when he wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her close, back to him. She swears she can feel his heartbeat against her back through the thin layer of his shirt and the thick layers of the sweatshirt, long-sleeve shirt and camisole she always wears to bed.

She wriggles around to face him. At first, he tenses up, gripping a fistfull of her shirt, but when he feels her settle back into the pillows, he relaxes. Then, after a moment, one blue eye cracks open.

“Morning,” she whispers.

He reaches up to stroke some hair away from her face. “Morning.”

She can’t help but chuckle. “What?” John asks.

“We’re such a cliche,” she says.

John squeezes her waist. “I think I can live with that.”

She laughs. John opens both of his eyes. They’re filled with something she can’t understand, some emotion she can’t quantify.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.

“You’re beautiful,” he mutters stubbornly, as if she’s going to fight him on this point. “That’s why.”

She can’t remember the last time someone called her beautiful. “Thank you.”

He smiles. Her heart does that plummeting thing again. She tries to hate it and fails.

“Wanna stay in bed?” he asks, burrowing back into the blankets like a child. He brushes a bare hand over the exposed skin of her waist. “You’re really warm.”

“It’s the layers,” she says.

He plucks at her sweatshirt. “Why so many?”

He won’t like the answer. Shame floods her cheeks. She bites her lip and shakes her head. Understanding colors his eyes. 

“Wanna stay?” he asks again. Emori sees wariness in his eyes, mixed with the sleepiness and adoration. He’s still afraid she’ll leave, she realizes. 

So is she. 

“We should get up,” she says, suddenly unable to meet his eyes. 

He makes a discontented noise and hides his face in the pillow. “No. Sleep.”

Emori laughs. “You’re such a child,” she tells him, pulling back the covers. A rush of cold air blows over them as she sits up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, her back to John and the window, where too much light is pouring in. 

“Note to self,” she says aloud. “Get curtains.”

John snorts. “Hey,” he says after a moment, reaching for her left wrist. She turns around to look back at him, and he tugs her down to kiss him. “Good morning.”

She smiles into the kiss. “You already said that, John.”

“That was before I was awake enough to appreciate how cute you are,” he says, a cocky grin playing over his lips. 

She means to peck him on the lips again, but he grips her neck gently and pulls her closer. She loves the way their mouths fit together, loves the pull of her teeth against his lower lip and the way he gasps ever-so-slightly when she does it. 

He sounds slightly breathless when they break apart. She turns away to smile into the palm of her bad hand. 

“So,” he asks, “what do you want to do today?”

Her smile fades. She’s tired of looking back at him, but looking straight at him burns her eyes. There’s a metaphor there, albeit a tired one, she thinks. Looking back is exhausting, but looking forward is a painful luxury. 

“I have homework,” she says, staring at the wall. She’s not picking either source of misery. Not this time. 

“Okay.” The blankets shuffle as he sits up. “We could get lunch later. Have an actual date, if you want.”

A thousand sharp words sit on her tongue. She could do it, right here, right now. She could eviscerate him and his love for her in this warm, vulnerable moment. 

Or, she could turn around. 

“Whatever you want, John,” she says softly, her eyes on the backpack in the corner. 

* * *

She spends a tense day downstairs, migrating between the living room and kitchen counter. John comes down for lunch, and it seems like he might ask her to eat with him, but he goes back upstairs without a word.

“What’s up with you two?” Octavia asks, leaning against the counter inches from Emori’s arm and eating a peanut butter sandwich with unusual gusto. “He’s usually all over you.”

Emori shrugs. Her tongue feels like lead. Her body aches. “Don’t know,” she mutters finally when Octavia’s eyes start to bore into her. 

“Funny,” Octavia says after a moment. “I thought Murphy was the one who ruined things just before they got good. Looks like you two traded places.”

Emori wants to be angry at those words, but she’s not. She doesn’t feel much of anything regarding that accusation. She doesn’t feel much of anything at all.

Octavia goes upstairs, and Emori follows. She trails her bad fingers over the worn walls as she walks and walks and ends up in front of John’s door.

It’s open. He’s not inside - he’s outside mowing the lawn with Monty while Raven tries to smooth out the pavers that masquerade as a patio of sorts - so she steps in and looks around. Dust motes dance in the sun and chilly air. The wind coming in from the cracked window make the papers taped to his wall rustle.

She drifts over to his makeshift wall decor. That poem he loves is there, written out in pieces on old paper, napkins and the backside of book jackets. There are photographs too: pictures of a younger John and Raven, the group photo Raven had emailed Emori back when she was still looking for a place to live, and taped behind most of them, a picture of her.

She doesn’t remember this picture, or even this day. She’s sitting on her windowsill, her legs dangling out into the open air. Her hair is down and blowing around her face, but her head is turned just enough to make out her tattoo and one of her eyes.

“Do you like it?”

Emori turns towards Lexa’s girlfriend’s voice. “I- yes. Did you take this?”

Costia nods. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d ever find out. Since your face was barely showing, I didn’t think you’d mind if I gave it to Lexa. She must have given it to Murphy.”

Emori shrugs. Her stomach does another one of those funny swoops. “It doesn’t matter.” She tries for a smile to put the younger girl at ease. “You’re good at this, kid.”

Costia smiles and tucks some hair behind her ear. “Thanks. Pictures are easy. Words, not so much.” She points to the wire coming from her ear and looping around behind it. “I can’t always hear, but I can always see.”

Emori blinks at her. She feels her left hand twitch. Costia looks down at it and smiles. “It’s not so bad, you know,” she says nonchalantly, backing out of the room. “I mean, I can understand why it may seem that way to you, and you’re certainly entitled to that, but I think it’s pretty cool.”

“And,” she says, pausing at the doorway to wink at Emori, “I know Murphy thinks so, too.”

Emori can’t help but chuckle. Costia departs with a cheerful wave, and Emori turns back to the wall, touching that photograph with a careful hand.

Her heart starts to race without preamble.  _ Leave, leave, leave, run, run, run. _

“No,” she says aloud. “No.”

And then, her phone rings.

* * *

“What do you mean, you got into trouble?” Emori can feel her blood pressure spiking. “Otan, for fuck’s sake-”

“Can you help me or not?”

And, God help her, she can. She can, but she isn’t sure she should. “Why should I?”

“It’s about Baylis.”

Her stomach does a slow roll. The scar on her face burns. Her heart races for the second time that day. “Otan, what the hell have you done?”

When he speaks, he doesn’t sound like the overconfident young man he usually is. He sounds scared. He sounds alone. “Can you come, Em?”

“Yes.” The word sears her throat. “I’ll come tomorrow.”

* * *

She wars with telling John all day.

Telling her professors was easy - she emailed them excuses about her brother having a personal emergency, and since she has no other family, it flies. Telling the others will hurt, but she’ll make it seem as though she’ll come back.

She won’t, though, and that’s what hurts the most. She can’t. If whatever hell Otan’s brought down on his head doesn’t kill her, the regret will. She can’t come back, but she can’t just leave. She won’t. 

“You okay?” Raven asks her as they settle in on the couch to watch some Netflix show with far too many white people. 

Emori nods, picking at the hole in her jeans that creeps down her thigh towards her knee. “Fine.”

Raven doesn’t look convinced; consequently, Emori’s not the least bit surprised when Raven, Luna, Octavia and a slightly-confused Lexa shanghai her outside after the show, leaving the boys inside to clean up.

“What’s going on?” Octavia asks Emori, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re acting...Murphy-like.”

“Well, they are dating,” Lexa points out.

“They’re not even official,” Luna corrects.

“But they’ve been on dates,” Raven contributes.

“So we agree,” Lexa says, and Emori sees Luna roll her eyes, “that they are dating.”

“Dates don’t mean they’re dating,” Octavia says.

“Guys!” Emori crosses her arms over her torso. “What’s your point?”

“You’re going down the Road of Self-Sabotage,” Octavia says, point-blank, in typical Blake fashion. “And yes, the capital letters are implied in my tone.”

“We’re worried about you,” Raven interjects gently. When Emori meets her eyes, they’re earnest and a little soft. It’s scary, almost as scary as the way John speaks to her, softly and reverently. “You haven’t been yourself since Friday night. I know it’s a lot to process, but you’re just giving off a vibe like...like something might be wrong.”

“I’m fine,” Emori says, biting down hard on her lip. Her whole body feels like it’s shivering - vibrating, maybe? The air is freezing cold, but her skin is burning. And her head hurts. She needs to go inside.

“I’ve seen this before,” Luna says softly. “You’re shutting down out of fear.”

_ Don’t tell me what I’m feeling _ , Emori wants to snap. Her tongue is lead. Her stomach churns. She has to go. Now.

“Excuse me,” she mutters, pushing past Lexa and Luna and nearly bashing Monty in the back with the door. She skitters through the kitchen and up the stairs and almost cracks her head on the mirror before coughing up her dinner into the sink.

With the bile come the tears. Distantly, she hears herself sobbing. She could swear that she’s saying something else, but she can’t make out the words. She’s hot, then cold, then hot again, and the whole world is spinning around her.

“Emori?”

It’s John. Of course it is.

“Mori, are you sick?”

“No,” she grinds out through gritted, dirty teeth. “I’m fine.”

He steps into the bathroom and closes the door. She can’t stop crying. Why can’t she stop crying? “Like hell you are.”

She meets his eyes in the mirror. Hers, bloodshot and raw, meet his, pained and transparent. “Emori, what’s the matter?”

_ My brother called. He’s in trouble and I have to save him. _

_ I can’t leave him or the guilt will eat me whole. _

_ I’m sorry. _

“I can’t-“ she coughs up more bile. John rubs the space between her shoulders until the heaving stops. Her legs can barely hold her up. She staggers back against him for support, and he wraps his arms around her middle.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs in her ear. “I’ve got you. Come on.”

He helps her stumble to his room and tucks her into his bed. Somehow, her shoes come off and so does her shirt, leaving her in a camisole and one of John’s long-sleeved thermal sweaters. She’s still shivering, or maybe just shaking, and her whole body aches, but she’s warmer than she’s ever been, and the room is only tilting, not spinning.

He folds her into his arms, her forehead against his collarbone, and runs his fingers through her hair. His gentleness, his care for her is nauseating. She hates it. She loves it.

“What’s the matter, Emori?” he asks quietly. “And don’t tell me it’s nothing.”

_ I’m going to leave you.  _ “It is. It’s nothing.”

“No, it’s not,” he argues. “You wouldn’t be throwing up over nothing.”

She shakes her head, then groans when the movement makes her head ache. “I’ll tell you later,” she murmurs, knowing full well that later will never come.

* * *

 

She found something online once, a small piece of poetry that she thought John would like. She doesn’t remember it all, but she scribbles the first two lines on a scrap of paper and leaves it on his pillow moments before she slips out the door for the last time.

_ Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. _

There’s more; she knows there is, but she can’t remember what it was. This, like everything else she is, is not enough.

He stirs slightly as she presses a kiss to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and he moves again, but doesn’t wake. “Good luck, John.”

The words she wrote follow her down the stairs and onto the road. They’re irrelevant to her, but not to him. He’ll be alright. He has to be. 

(She tries not to think about his hands on his neck, his shouting nightmares, his day drinking and surly attitude and the fear that drove him into her room more often than not.)

She left the pocketknife she stole from the convenience store her first week at home under the floorboards in her room. For reasons she can’t - won’t - examine, she feels better knowing that some small, detachable part of her is still there, in the only place she ever really felt loved.

Her love for Otan is a different kind of love: a practical one, a survivalist one. They needed each other - or, he needed her - and so she stayed. The love she has for the people in that old noisy house, for genius Raven and sensitive Monty and rowdy Jasper and all the others - is a luxury, a deep and terrifying thing.

The love she has for John is even more rare, and twice as delicate.

The love she has for John... She smiles into the darkness of the night and the old gravel road, despite herself and her tears. She loves him, and she lost him, but it her own choice. Somehow that makes it worse.

She keeps walking. The gravel road gives way to concrete, and the stars give way to the sunrise as she boards the express train to the city. Her heavy backpack bumps against the seat in front of her when she swings it down.

“Sorry,” she says to the woman in front of her. She turns, and Emori realizes it’s Anya, the woman from her public health class. “Oh. Hi.”

Anya raises an eyebrow at her. “Where are you going?”

“Away,” Emori says shortly. 

“You coming back?”

Emori shakes her head, then shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a family thing.”

The longer she lies, the easier it is. She settles into that routine as easily as breathing. With every breath, the old Emori, the college-Emori, the roommate-Emori, the once-loved-by-someone-else-Emori slips away.

“Want me to send you the homework?” Anya asks, her eyes glinting in the sudden sunlight from the train’s dirty windows.

Emori doesn’t have access to a computer anymore, but she doesn’t tell Anya that. “Sure. Thanks.”

They don’t speak, but Anya stands up and moves to the seat across the aisle from her. She stays there, facing Emori, until the train creaks to a stop just outside the downtown limits.

“Be careful,” she says, and Emori gets the sense that, maybe, Anya understands what’s at the heart of all this. “Remember who your friends are.”

Then, she’s gone. Emori leans her head against the window and tries to forget that her friends are all the people she has left behind.

* * *

“I didn’t think you’d show,” Otan says from the bottom of the stairs leading down from the train platform.

Emori doesn’t have anything to say to that. She regards him with feigned indifference, though her heart is beating at a slightly slower tempo now that she sees he’s clearly unharmed.

“Tell me what happened,” she says shortly, brushing past him. He follows. She knows he will.

“Gideon and the others, they’re pissed about Baylis.” Emori snorts. “What?”

“Gideon doesn’t have the balls to stand up to you about anything, let alone Baylis-” Emori turns on her heel, nearly slamming into her brother’s chest. “Wait. They know you did it?”

He snorts. “Obviously.”

“Wait,” she says again. “I took the fall - and very publicly. So how the fuck do they know?”

Otan looks sheepish. Emori feels her whole body start to vibrate, but in rage this time. “Did you brag about it?”

“Em, it was a good kill-” he starts, and Emori cuts him off with a slap across the face. “What the hell?”

“I went to jail for it. To  _ protect you _ , and you were out here bragging about what you did?” She’s seething now. “ _ Fuck  _ you, Otan. Fuck you.” She scoffs. “I can’t believe I came here to help you.”

“I still need your help,” he says, and his eyes are earnest, pleading. She hates it. She hates the sight of him more than anything else in the world right now. “They’re pissed at me for taking him out. They want revenge, and you can talk them out of it. They liked you. They’ll listen to you.”

“No.” Her voice is loud and clear. The empty street seems to still at the sound of it. A cold wind whips through her thin jacket. “No. I won’t.”

Otan tries to convince her further, but she’s always been the smooth talker. He gives up with a hurled insult left to simmer and burn at her feet and stalks into the cool morning air.

“I know you’ll come find me,” he tells her, tossing a scrap of paper into her face. It drifts down to the sidewalk.

Emori stands there, in the middle of a city she hates, shaking and afraid because after all this, after  _ everything _ , she has cut herself off from everyone that could possibly want her and for what? Nothing.

“I can’t go back,” she says aloud to herself, just to make it real.

_ The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. _

Yes, it can. It brought her here, and now, it’s all she knows.

She picks up the paper. It is brittle and cold in her hands. The address isn’t far. She can walk. So she does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think! And....sorry.....


	8. All Those Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Where are you?” he asks, because nothing in this moment matters more than making sure she’s okay.
> 
> She laughs, once. It’s the darkest sound he’s ever heard. “No, John. Not this time.”
> 
> “Emori, please.” He’s begging for something more than her time. A chance, maybe? A chance to try loving her. A chance to be someone that can help her, someone that can watch while she pulls herself up all on her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: one reference of implied suicide ideation. Pls don't hesitate to message me if you need more info. Your safety is most important to me <3
> 
> Enjoy!

_ I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,   
_ _ smiling in a way   
_ _ that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,   
_ _ up the stairs of the building   
_ _ to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,   
_ _ I looked out the window and said   
_ _ T _ his doesn’t look that much different from home _ ,   
_ _ because it didn’t,   
_ __ but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

* * *

 

**Then**

_ She always sleeps facing the door. He likes to sleep facing her, mostly because it helps him to wake up beside someone else and see their face before he jolts fully awake. _

_ She never sleeps deeply, either; she’s always shifting and muttering, waking up every five minutes, her hand wrapped around the handle of the knife she keeps under her pillow. He sleeps like the dead, but he always wakes up when she shudders awake from another nightmare. _

_ “You okay?” Raven asks him once when he staggers downstairs at four in the morning. He doesn’t ask why she’s up and nursing a cup of coffee. He has a feeling she won’t tell him anyway. _

_ He shakes his head, leans on the counter opposite her, hangs his head down between his arms. “She has nightmares, and I can’t sleep and-” he breaks off. “ _ Fuck,  _ Raven, how can I help her when I’m still falling apart?” _

_ Raven twists her hair around her fingers. “She doesn’t need to be saved, you know.” _

_ Murphy nods. “But I have to do something.” _

_ When Raven blinks at him, her eyes tell a thousand stories. “She doesn’t need you to save her,” Raven says again. “She just needs you to be there.” _

* * *

 

**Now**

Murphy doesn’t realize anything is wrong until he gets the call.

It’s from an unknown number, so he lets it go to voicemail the first time. He’s in the middle of class, and it’s not like he’s paying attention or anything, but he’s not going to risk another angry glare from his professor just to go out into the hall and yell at a telemarketer.

His phone stops buzzing. But then it rings again. And again. And again. So finally, just to make it stop, he goes out into the hall - and yes, his professor glared, thanks very much - and picks it up with a short, “Stop calling me!”

“John?”

His heart damn near crawls out of his throat. “Emori?” Through the static, he can hear her breath tremble. “Emori, where are you? Why aren’t you using your cell?”

The worst has happened, he thinks. She’s gotten arrested again or hurt somehow. She’s in some kind of trouble, and, for some reason, she called him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I couldn’t- I can’t-”

“Where are you?” he interrupts, because her voice has that hollow tone it did after her fight with Otan. Because he thinks that tone means that she’s about to do something dangerous. Because he has a wild, sudden fear that she’s left.

“I went back.” Her voice is cold. No, not cold, lifeless. Empty. It scares him. “Back to the city.”

Murphy expects to be angry. He expects to feel betrayed, angry and so, so hurt - but he’s not. He’s scared for her, and he’s worried about her, and he just wants to bring her home.

“Why?” he asks.

“I couldn’t stay there,” she whispers. 

“Where are you?” he asks, because nothing in this moment matters more than making sure she’s okay.

She laughs, once. It’s the darkest sound he’s ever heard. “No, John. Not this time.”

“Emori, please.” He’s begging for something more than her time. A chance, maybe? A chance to try loving her. A chance to be someone that can help her, someone that can watch while she pulls herself up all on her own.

“John…” She sniffs. “I-”

The line goes dead. Murphy fights the urge to hurl his cell phone against the wall.

Then, he starts to think. There’s only one city nearby, and that city only has two train stations in it and no bus lines. Emori wouldn’t go to the affluent, white neighborhoods; she’d stay low, where she felt safe, where she could pick pockets and pull off heists and wait for whatever dark and nebulous thing churning in her gut to worm its way out.

He makes up his mind right there, in the dull hallway under the fluorescent lights: he’s going.

He goes back into the classroom and grabs his backpack, then calls Bellamy to convince him to take him to the train station.

“Why?” Bellamy asks as he starts the car. It sounds tinny over the phone speakers.

“There’s something I have to do,” Murphy says.

“What?”

Murphy sighs, running his free hand through his hair. “Emori called. She left town last night. I’m going after her.”

He stays on the phone with Bellamy, but neither of them say another word until he pulls up at the curb. Murphy climbs in and drops his backpack at his feet.

“When will you be back?” Bellamy asks.

Murphy shrugs. Bellamy looks incensed. “Problem, Blake?”

“You don’t even have a change of clothes,” the older man points out.

“When people leave, they don’t come back,” Murphy says, stepping up on the curb. He has to make an actual effort to tamp down the bitterness he feels at her for leaving him. _ It wasn’t about you _ , he tells himself.  _ Don’t act like it is.  _ “So I’m going to her.”

“What should I tell Raven?”

“Whatever the hell you want,” Murphy says.

Bellamy parks near the train station. He looks like he’s about to say something, but he just closes his mouth, shakes his head and unlocks the doors.

“Be careful, Murphy,” he says softly.

Murphy gives him a mocking salute and begins climbing the stairs to the train platform.

* * *

The train station in what Murphy guesses is Emori’s neighborhood is elevated, dirty and cold. A crisp fall wind cuts through his jacket and tips his backpack over once, then again, until he props it on the bench next to him with an irritated sigh.

He’s here, and that’s as far as his plan went. He’s hoping that maybe Emori will come back to the station, maybe to go somewhere, maybe to look for him. He’s hoping that he’ll see a friendly face, or find some other way to get to her.

“Should’ve thought this out,” he mutters to himself. It’s the closest he’ll ever be to admitting that Bellamy might have been right.

He must have dozed off, because he wakes up to two fingers tapping him on the shoulder and the scuffing of old boots on the rough concrete.

“John?”

Her voice is rough. He sits upright. “Emori.” Then, “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“What are you doing here?” she asks, something adjacent to a laugh catching her voice.

“Looking for you,” he says softly.

She sits down beside him and reaches for his hand. He takes it, lacing his fingers through hers. He wishes she had given him her badass hand to hold.

Normally, she would lean her head on his shoulder. He settles for the awkward way her thumb runs over his knuckles. When she looks him in the eye, he sees  _ her _ : tired, alone and scared.

Fear is not an emotion he associates with her. The sight of it in her eyes worries him.

“Emori-” he starts, then stops when she shakes her head.

“Don’t,” she whispers. 

“Can I come home with you?” he asks her. He needs to be invited, he realizes, and then he curses himself for doing this alone. Raven should be here, or Luna, someone who is actually capable of reading moods and emotions. Raven had to push him into standing with Emori during her fight with Otan, and Luna has been explaining Emori to him for a solid month. He has no hope of doing this right - not alone.

“Sure,” she says softly and stands up. She doesn’t let go of his hand; when he tries to pull away to give her space, she makes a tiny, soft sound and pulls him that much closer.

It dawns on him then that maybe he is what she wants, even if he’s not what she needs.

She takes him back to a studio apartment near the tracks. It’s obviously not hers or her brother’s - he sincerely doubts she has enough money to keep the lights and power on, and he also doubts she’d ever accept anything from her brother. 

The whole place is cold, and the floor is a mess. She falls into bed, face down, with the lights and her shoes still on, and he follows her after turning off the overhead lights and switching on the bedside lamp. He lays beside her without hesitation, and she lets him. She barely even moves, just inspects him out of one eye not concealed by the pillow.

“Why did you come?” she asks.

“To bring you home,” he answers honestly. “Or to make sure you were okay.”

He looks over at her. The more he looks, the more he sees. There are tear tracks on her cheeks. She takes no notice of them. He wonders if she's cried too much to care. 

“Liar,” she mumbles into the pillow. “No one cares enough to stay.”

“I do,” he says. He’s bad at comfort, but he can do this. He  _ will _ do this, he amends.

“Why?”

He sighs. The words burn him from the inside out.  _ Say it,  _ says the spiteful voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Ontari.  _ Say it, but only if you want to blow this all to hell. _

_ Say it _ . The words come again, but they’re in Emori’s voice.

_ I want to fall in love with you, but I’m not sure that I can. _

“Why?” she asks again. Her voice is sharp, yet weary. 

“Because I love you,” he says softly.

“That doesn’t fix anything - wait.” She sits up. Her hair swings over one shoulder. Her eyes are bright. “What did you say?”

“I love you,” Murphy says again. His voice trembles on the vowels. “I love you, Emori.”

“John,” she whispers. Her eyes fill with tears. She shakes her head.

“I love you,” he says again, and she bites down hard on her lower lip. “I’m so in love with you, it’s fucking ridiculous.” 

She shakes her head again. Then, she reaches for him, for his cheek and his lower lip, which she touches with a shaking thumb. “You don’t mean that.”

“Why is it so hard for you to believe it?”

The hand against his skin trembles. “Because it doesn’t work that way.”

“When have I ever done what was expected of me?”

She chuckles. He can feel his lips splitting into a smile. Her thumb strokes fondly over his grin.

“I love you too,” she whispers, and tears well in her eyes.

He leans up to press a kiss to her lips. He can’t help it: she’s beautiful, even eaten up with guilt and sadness, and he feels like his heart’s going to explode out of his chest. She loves him. She loves him. She loves him.

_ Take that, Ontari. _

She rests her head against his collarbone, pressing kisses to his chest through the fabric of his shirt. His skin prickles where she touches it. “I’m sorry, John,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry for leaving you.”

He doesn’t have an answer for that. He looks over his shoulder to the kitchen, a tiny, open-ended space with paper taped up over the window near the sink, chipped plaster on the walls and papers taped there, some with words and some with sketches. It doesn’t make the place feel homey. It makes the place feel abandoned and desolate, like the person who lived here last left pieces of themselves behind.

“Hold on,” he says instead, standing up, despite her protests, and getting her a glass of water from the kitchen. “Drink,” he tells her, handing her the glass.

She blinks up at him. “Why?”

“Because you’ve been crying, and you need water.”

She takes a sip. He tries to speak, but she turns her head away and sets the glass down, and he figures arguing with her would only spin them both in a circle.

He sits down on the bed again, toeing his shoes off and scooting over to untie hers. He remembers another bed, another night, her shaking voice and her fear.

_ It’s not your fault,  _ he wants to say, but it is. She left him, and he won’t wait forever; he needs to know now if she’s leaving or if she wants him to stay.

He looks up to ask, but she’s fallen asleep, so he tugs her shoes off, sets them on the floor, and clambers back up beside her. He watches her breathe and counts the times her eyelids flutter and her nose wrinkles as she drifts off. When she finally succumbs to a truly deep sleep, he can tell: her cheeks go slack, her fingers stop twitching and her lips part with a tiny sigh.

He’s about to sleep when the front door bangs open. Mercifully, Emori doesn’t wake - she flinches a little, then curls into him with another sigh when he runs his fingers through her hair and shushes her quietly - but Murphy nearly jumps out of his skin until he sees who it is.

Then, he just gets pissed.

“What are you doing here?” Otan asks, dropping a battered cardboard box onto the table.

Murphy props himself up on an elbow, careful not to jostle Emori, and glares. “She called me. So I came.”

“Why?”

Murphy scoffs. “Because I care about your sister. I care a hell of a lot more than you.”

Otan shoves one worn dining room chair aside. The noise makes Emori flinch again. That makes Murphy angrier.

“You need to shut your mouth,” Otan tells him.

Murphy scrambles to his feet. He’s shorter than Otan - fucking figures - but he’s angry enough to contemplate doing some damage to the older man’s already-scarred face.

“John?” Emori asks in that rough, sleepy voice. She sits up, her hair falling over her shoulder, and blinks up at him and her brother. “Otan, what-“

“We were just talking,” Otan says, holding up his hands concilitorially.

“I didn’t ask,” she says. She sounds equal parts weary and irritated. Her voice gets lower, more accented when she speaks to her brother. She stands up, blinking the tiredness from her eyes, and side-steps Murphy to stand chest-to-chest with Otan. “Leave John alone.”

“He shouldn’t be here,” Otan argues.

“He came for me,” Emori retorts. She looks at Murphy out of the corner of her eye, and he sees wonder there. “He came for me,” she whispers again, and, as much as Murphy hates Otan, something in his chest warms to see the other man’s eyes soften just a fraction. “So he stays.”

Otan stuffs his hands in his pockets and takes a step back. “Fine. He stays.”

The box on the table is full of computer parts. Murphy asks if they’re stolen, but Emori refuses to say. She and Otan start sorting through them while Murphy rummages around in the kitchen. Otan watches him carefully, but says nothing, probably unwilling to incur Emori’s wrath. Whatever she’s doing here, it’s obviously a begrudging favor to him, and he probably doesn’t want to fuck it up.

Smart choice.

He takes a walk around the neighborhood, partly because he’s bored and partly because he’s never really had a neighborhood to walk around. Raven’s house is, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of nowhere, and the town he grew up in wasn’t much better.

This neighborhood is rough and tangled, a conglomerate of cracked sidewalks, rusted fire hydrants, dangling power lines and flickering street lights. The people are friendly, though; they nod at him when he passes them and two older women sitting on a front porch wave and call out hellos to him as he passes.

He ends up at a grocery store, where he buys canned soup, some bread, cheese and lettuce, a package of frozen hamburgers and, with a smile, a small bag of frozen green beans.

“You must be hungry,” the guy at the register says. He’s maybe Murphy’s age or a little older, with clever eyes and a look about him that reminds him of Raven: smart, self-assured, confident in all the right ways.

“It’s not all for me,” he responds, digging for his wallet.

The guy nods, then leans forward slightly to study Murphy’s face. Murphy leans back, almost reflexively. “Have we met?”

Murphy shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait.” The guy pulls out his phone. “Do you know this girl?”

Murphy frowns at the sight of Raven’s photograph. “Yeah. That’s my best friend. Are you- She never mentioned you.”

The guy grins. “I’m Zeke Shaw. Bellamy Blake introduced us - I’m in my first year of the masters program she wants to get into. We’ve been talking.” Zeke hands Murphy his other bag. “Nice to meet you. Tell Raven hey for me, okay?”

Murphy barely waits until he leaves the store before pulling out his phone and calling Raven. “Zeke Shaw, Reyes? Explain.”

“You first.” Raven is pissed. “Where the  _ hell _ are you? Bellamy said he dropped you off at the train station and that you offered jack shit insight on where you were going or what you were doing. I’ve been blowing up Emori’s phone too, trying to see if she knew where you were.”

“I’m with her,” he says.

“You- what?”

Murphy sighs. “She left. I came after her. We’ll be home at some point, and I’ll keep you posted.”

“Is she...okay?”

“I hope so.”

Raven sighs. “You’re doing a good thing, J.”

“Thanks.” Then, “so, what’s up with Zeke Shaw?”

Raven’s groan makes him double over with laughter.

* * *

Emori doesn’t say a word until nearly three in the morning when she finally comes to bed.

Murphy sits up with her until then. He leans against the windowsill and looks out toward the city’s center, watching all the lights flicker in the distance, hearing the sirens and the rushing cars. Everything ebbs and flows this time of night, and he likes it. He finds peace in it.

He remembers one time, before Raven broke him out of Ontari’s house for the last time, when he took a walk around the block and found himself standing on the bridge near the highway overpass. He had looked up at the stars and felt himself start to pitch forward, down toward the noisy road, and for one small second, he thought about letting himself fall.

He blinks, and the city doesn’t seem so peaceful anymore.

“It looks like home,” he says after a moment, knowing Emori will be listening. “With all the lights, I mean. They’re just closer this time.”

She sits across from him on the windowsill and leans her head against the cool glass. Her legs tangle with his. Her eyes are so tired - so impassive and so beautiful.

“I’m worried about you,” he says, the late hour making him exhausted and honest. The whole world feels warped in this one moment. Everything is warm, except his skin where it touches hers, which is freezing.

“Why?” she asks. She doesn’t look over at him; her eyes track the cars moving below them, and her badass hand shivers on its perch atop her bent knee. 

“You were throwing up, all upset and shit, and now you’re back with him,” Murphy says. His words slur together, making Emori look sharply up at him. He’s tired, not drunk, but she may not see it that way.

“Come to bed, John,” she says abruptly, and doesn’t say anything until they’re curled together under the rough sheets, their heads under the covers so as not to wake Otan, who’s snoring on the couch.

“They call it dissociation,” Emori murmurs. “The way you feel sometimes. I looked it up.”

She means the times when he feels like he’s living in a dream. He hums, nods to acknowledge her. “Good to know.”

Emori tucks her chin toward her chest and her knees against his side. She’s facing the door. She’s always facing the door.

“C’mere,” he says in a moment of bravery and protectiveness.

She lifts her head. “Why?”

He throws the sheet off them and pushes on her shoulder until she turns on her side. Then, he curls around her back, resting one arm over her waist. 

After sitting up to pull the covers over them, he nuzzles into the back of her neck, kissing the soft skin there. “Do you trust me?” he murmurs.

She sighs. “Yes.”

“I’ve got you,” he tells her. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

Suddenly, something springs to the forefront of his mind: an image of her note, left on his bedroom floor, thrown there by his movements. He hadn’t thought anything of it, not until now. Was it her goodbye? Was that something he should have thought of even before she called him?

What a failure he’s turning out to be.

But he remembers her words, and she remembers the rest of it too. “ _ Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you _ ,” he whispers in her ear. He feels her stiffen. “ _ The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. _ ”

He reaches for her badass hand and squeezes. _ “And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present.” _

“I thought you’d like it,” she says. Her voice is guarded. “The poem, I mean. But I couldn’t remember the end of it.”

“The end is the most important,” he says softly. She twists in his arms until she’s facing him again.  _ “This now, _ ” he says slowly, watching her eyes darken, then fill with tears. _ “This us, we can cope with that. We can do this together, you and I _ .”

She draws him close to kiss him, slow and deep. Her tongue presses against his lower lip, then against his teeth and tongue. He grips her waist and pulls her to him, so close he could fuse them into one person if he was strong enough.

“More,” she murmurs when he breaks away to breathe. “John…”

“More of what?”

She shakes her head, bites down hard on her own lip. “I don’t know.”

He knows the feeling of grasping, of waiting and wanting for something that might never come to him. “I’m here.” It’s not even a comfort, he thinks, but he hopes it’s enough.

She takes a deep breath. Her eyes meet his, then trace over his cheeks, his nose, his mouth. Her gaze is as heavy as her fingers. “Otan bragged about his kill.”

“The one that landed you in jail?” Murphy asks, trying to follow the change in subject.

She nods. “Bad things are following him because of it. I’m trying to help.”

“How?”

She sighs. “We’ve got to shut down the rumor. I don’t know how, but we have to. And I have to come back and act like everything is normal.”

“Is it dangerous?” There’s a knot in his stomach that shivers with every breath she takes.

“Yes.” Her eyes search his face. “I won’t be able to come back for a while.”

“And you want me to leave,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice is palpable. 

“Wait for me.” Her eyes glint in the window’s light. They plead with him to understand. “I’ll come back.”

He props himself up on his elbow. “When people leave, they don’t come back.”

“I will,” she says. Her eyes are pleading. “Please, John, I want you to be safe. You won’t be if you’re here. I can’t protect you.”

He can’t meet her eyes anymore. “Fine.”

“John…”

He turns his back to her. His whole body hurts. He wants to hit something. He wants to make her hurt. After all this, she doesn’t trust him. He’s not owed anything from her, but he wanted this, wanted some peace, wanted to make sure she’d come home.

He isn’t sure. He isn’t sure of anything. He lets her fall asleep without him, and, in the middle of the night, he prepares to leave.

* * *

 

“She loves you.”

Murphy nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of Otan’s voice. “Jeez, man.”

“Sorry.” He doesn’t seem sorry. His eyes glint in the light of Murphy’s phone. “She loves you. It’s obvious.”

Murphy shoulders his backpack. “She knows where to find me.”

Otan sighs. “I fucked up, and I fucked her over. Don’t do the same thing.”

Murphy looks over to the bed. Her back is still to him. He might never see her face again.

“You’re one to talk,” he tells Otan, and barely restrains himself from slamming the door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, sorry.


	9. Inside Your Head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So she does the unthinkable. She tells the truth. Well, most of it; she tells them about Otan’s call, the fear in his voice when he asked her for help, and her short-lived homecoming. At Raven’s insistence, she adds sparse details about her half-minded call to John, mostly to explain why Bellamy had to drive him to the train station, but also to purge the lingering ache and fear that haunted her at that moment. She needed someone, and she chose him.
> 
>  _He didn’t choose me_ , she thinks, unbidden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen guys, [Megan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/interlude) made this chapter so great and also made me die of laughter at her Google Docs comments, so all credit for this chapter's amazingness goes to her.  
> Also [Katie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/debate) left me a headcannon in a review and I ended up working it into the fic (see: the end). Thank you, Katie <3

_Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all_  
_forgiven,_  
_even though we didn’t deserve it._  
_Inside your head you hear_  
_a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up_  
_in a stranger’s bathroom,_  
_standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away  
_ _from the dirtiest thing you know._

* * *

 

**Then**

_“I got arrested once,” John tells her, taking a swig from the bottle of crappy vodka they’re sharing._

_Something between a laugh and a cough catches in her throat. “You? For what?”_

_He grins, sharp, proud and self-depreciating all at once. “Arson.”_

_Emori chokes on a laugh. “What the hell?”_

_John passes her the bottle. She takes it in her bad hand. His eyes follow the motion. “I lit a guy’s bed on fire. It spread to the curtains, then up to the ceiling, and the whole place lit up like a fucking tinder box.”_

_Emori swallows hard around the lump in her throat and the vodka in her mouth. “Why’d you do it?”_

_He reaches for her hand. He takes her wrist, the scarred one attached to the worst part of her, puts the bottle down and presses a kiss there. “He talked shit about Raven.” Emori snorts. “I know. I was really well-adjusted, clearly. But,” he trails off. His eyes cloud with memories. Emori rubs her good hand over his arm to bring him back. “He killed my dad, too. So fair’s fair.”_

_“But you got away with it,” she says softly, the alcohol going to her head, making her brave enough to inch closer, rest her legs atop his, press a kiss to the underside of his sharp jaw._

_He looks down at her. “I get away with a lot of things.”_

* * *

The sound of the front door closing wakes Emori up.

“John?” she asks, her voice barely more than a whisper. “John?” She reaches behind her, her hand searching for his body. He might hate her for asking him to leave - _it’s for his own safety_ , she tells herself, as if that makes it hurt any less - but surely he wouldn’t have left her.

The bed is empty. A cold shiver runs down her spine.

“He left,” Otan says from the couch. He switches on the dim lamp near his head and looks at her over the cushions. “Just now.”

She doesn’t think; she springs from the bed, sprints across the apartment, flings the door open and races down three flights of steep, metal stairs, barely brushing the floor with her feet before bursting out the fire door and looking around frantically. He’s crossing the street, his figure barely illuminated by the one flickering streetlight on the block.

“John!” she gasps, chest heaving. “John!”

She runs to him, grabs his wrist and pulls. He stops and doesn’t turn.

“What, Emori?” he snaps.

“You could have stayed the night,” she whispers. Her words catch in her throat. She feels her bare feet tremble against the concrete.

“What?”

He turns around to face her. She feels herself exhale sharply. “You could’ve stayed,” she says again, a little louder. “At least until the morning.”

“It is the morning.” She can’t tell if that’s his excuse to leave, or just a casual observation. “You told me I shouldn’t.”

“That’s not- I didn’t mean you had to go right now.”

He sighs. The hurt in his eyes burns so intensely she feels it may incinerate her. “Make up your mind, then.”

She has to stop herself from physically recoiling at his words. “Fine,” she snaps. “Then go. I’m not stopping you.”

She realizes suddenly how pathetic she must look, standing in the cold, barefoot on the sidewalk, clutching the wrist of a boy she barely knows but somehow loves.

“Go,” she says again, softer this time. She drops his wrist and looks up at him. His eyes are half-shut as he looks down at her, as if he wants to kiss her or kill her, but can’t decide which.

He inhales as if he’s about to say something, then turns and walks away. She wraps her arms around herself, curls inwards as if shielding herself from a blow, and watches him go.

* * *

She doesn’t know how long she’s been outside. She doesn’t realize she’s shivering or remember where she is until she feels her brother’s warm hand on her shoulder.

“Em?” He sounds worried. He wraps his old leather jacket around her shoulders. She turns her face to the collar of it; it smells like grease and dry air. “What happened?”

She looks up at him and smiles softly, partially to reassure him that she’s okay, partially to keep the tears welling in her eyes from falling. “He left.”

Otan’s brow furrows. She can see the concern in his eyes. The sky is the darkest it will ever be this side of morning. Emori wants to take that darkness and swallow it, make it part of who she is, make herself into something brittle and broken enough to never be hurt like this again.

“What happened?” Otan asks.

She doesn’t have the energy to pick apart Otan’s concern for her, to wonder if it’s real or just an act born of contrition, so she makes the cautious assumption that it’s genuine.

“He-” The tears in her eyes have trickled down to her throat. They threaten to choke her, so she clears her throat and tries again. “He wouldn’t have been safe here. Not with what I have to do. And he was angry that I didn’t want him to stay.”

“But you’re right,” Otan says slowly, brow furrowed. “It’s not safe, so why-”

“Because I did want him to stay!” Emori shouts, not mindful of the late hour or the possible noise complaint from the neighbors. “I wanted him here, but I told him to go home so he wouldn’t get hurt! And now he thinks I don’t want him at all!”

She lets out one small sob, and Otan wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her to his chest. “I didn’t want him to go,” she whispers. “Why didn’t I want him to go?”

“You loved him,” Otan murmurs, and something inside her twists painfully at the past-tense verb.

Emori shakes her head. “I can’t have. I only knew him for-” she breaks off to count from August to November. “Three months.”

Otan sighs. The sound against her ear brings back a flood of memories, small moments from before she knew she couldn’t trust him. “We’ve always been like that, you and me. Love who you have, and love them as quick as you can, because nothing good lasts.”

He’s right. Her gut twists again. “I missed you,” she whispers. Her feet are going numb. Her teeth are still chattering. “Why did you leave me?”

“I’m sorry, Em,” he whispers against her hair. “I’m sorry.”

Eventually, she swallows her tears and becomes aware of Otan’s shaking arms around her. “You’re cold,” she mumbles. “We should get back inside.”

They clatter up the metal stairs, which are freezing against Emori’s numb feet, and collapse on the bed. She doesn’t bother to clean off her feet or take off Otan’s jacket; she just burrows under the covers that feel as cold as the air outside. Otan lets her hide her head against his shoulder and pretends along with her that she’s not crying.

They curl together like they used to, back when they were young in their mother’s shitty apartment that never had heat, back when they were newly-minted criminals in the basement out in the country that leaked when it rained and spit roaches when it was hot, back when they were the best team in the illegal tech trade and lived out of alleys and cars.

“I was an idiot,” Otan says softly. It’s an apology. Emori knows that for sure.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, sniffing back a few tears. She hears John’s voice in her head telling her that she should drink some water, that she’s been crying too much.

She has been. She has been crying too much, over her brother and John and everyone in that house and everything that she is.

She’s going to change that, she decides. Starting now. No more apologies, no more crises of conscience. It’s her and Otan against the world, just like it always was. She shouldn’t want to be anything else. She _won’t_ want to be anything else.

“Love you, O,” she mumbles into his shoulder. “It’ll be okay. I’ll fix it.”

“You’d better,” Otan says with a laugh. Emori was talking about his current predicament with Gideon, but she has a feeling he’s talking about John. “I’ve never seen someone look at you like that.”

Her brother’s observance is really not helping her resolve. “So?”

“Don’t tell me you really want to let that go.”

Emori rolls onto her back and crosses her arms over her middle. “I don’t know, Otan.” She hears her voice take on a bitter bite and gnaws on her lower lip until the anger subsides. “It doesn’t matter. He hates me now.”

“Because you told him to leave?”

Emori laughs. “You’re so innocent sometimes, you know that?”

Otan looks offended. “Hey! I have a longer rap sheet than you; I’m way beyond innocent.”

“Not with this.” She looks over at him. “Have you ever been in love?”

Otan studies the comforter. Distantly, Emori wonders about the people who lived here before. Why did they leave so much behind? Who were they? Who made those drawings on the kitchen wall, and who taped the bedroom window shut?

“I might have been, once,” he says softly. Emori’s head snaps to look at him. “It was a long time ago, though.”

“You’re not that old,” she says, partially to tease and partially to get more of the story out of him.

“You were probably...ten?” he guesses, studying the ceiling with intent eyes. “She moved into the apartment across from us - this was when we were squatting in that housing development - and she came over once to see if we had any tools so she could put together a desk. She was tough and arrogant and a total bitch, and I was totally gone for her from the second I saw her.”

Emori frowns. She doesn’t remember this story at all. “What happened?”

“I got arrested, and she looked after you for a couple days.”

Now Emori remembers. “Her? Really?”

Otan nods. “When I got back, I took her out. We kissed, made out a little at her place. But she shut herself off from me after that. And we moved away, and I tried to forget about her.”

“How long did it take you?” She turns her head back to the ceiling so he can’t read the hope in her eyes. “Before you forgot.”

“I never forgot about her,” he laughs sarcastically. “Obviously. And I think if I saw her again that I’d feel the same way I did then. But I stopped missing her about a year after we left.”

A year. A year of feeling like this. Emori feels her heart drop. “Oh.”

Otan starts running his fingers through her tangled hair like he did when she was a kid. “I don’t think your story with him is over, kid. Give it time.”

“Don’t call me kid,” she grumbles, not willing to let on how his words soothed the ache in her gut. She falls into a doze soon after, waking only to nuzzle into the pillow when Otan tells her he loves her.

* * *

Arranging a meeting with Gideon has never been the easiest thing, but now it’s damn near impossible without going through his boss, the one guy Emori really doesn’t want to talk to.

“Are you joking?” Emori growls when she reads the coded email sent to Otan’s alias inbox. “Jaha? Seriously?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Otan asks.

“He’s a fucking hippie, that’s what,” she snaps. “What kind of name is Thelonious, anyway?”

Otan grins, probably because Emori’s right. He looks like a boy when he smiles, despite the scars stretching over his face. “Well, he’s Gideon’s boss, so you’re going to have to deal with him.”

Emori groans. “He’s better than Baylis, at least.”

Otan’s face darkens suddenly. “Anyone is better than Baylis.”

He wanders around the kitchen a little bit while Emori reluctantly replies to the email with a time and place to meet. Then, once she’s confident Otan won’t look over her shoulder and - despite what she knows is best - she opens her school email.

There’s only two messages there that she actually cares about. Her heart pounds as she opens the first one.

 

> **From:** RReyes
> 
> **Subject:** where are you?
> 
> _Your phone’s off and J won’t tell me a damn thing. This address is still active, which must mean you haven’t disenrolled. I’m worried about you. I don’t care about the rent or all your stuff - your room is staying as-is - but I’m worried about you. If you’re into something bad, we can help you. We’ll find a way. Call me or Bellamy or J - just call someone. You’re scaring me._
> 
> _-Raven_

She hovers the mouse over the reply button, then hits the delete key instead. She contemplates not reading the second email at all, but before she can stop herself, she opens it.

 

> **From:** JMurphy
> 
> **Subject:** sorry
> 
> _I shouldn’t have left like that. I don’t want to be the reason you don’t come back. We miss you. Monty’s started taping kitchen knives to the top of his roomba to imitate those fighting robot videos he and Jasper like. One of them stabbed Bellamy’s new girlfriend in the ankle. That’s another long story, believe me. Anyway, it’s not the same without you. We cooked out at the lake again but it was too cold so we ended up going home and watching action movies. I think you would’ve liked one of them._
> 
> _Come home. I miss you._

She doesn’t realize she’s making strange choking noises until Otan appears at her side, face full of concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” She slams the laptop shut.

“Em.”

She hides her face in her hands and dries her eyes on her glove before any tears can fall. “I’m fine.”

Otan makes a discontented noise, but moves away. Emori deletes John’s email, too.

* * *

“Stop fidgeting,” Emori hisses at Otan, who shifts from foot to foot at the mouth of the alley. “You are _so_ not helping.”

“He’s late,” Otan grumbles, kicking a pebble in Emori’s direction. The setting sun paints the broken brick wall behind him a myriad of colors.

Emori tucks her chin into the collar of her jacket and kicks the pebble back at her brother. “Stop,” she says again, leveling him with a stare. “This is why I never let you be the bait in our cons.”

Otan snorts, then shifts so he’s obscured by shadows when two figures appear down the street. Emori peeks around the corner, then swears out loud. “ _Shit_.”

“What?” Otan leans out again to peer at them. “Do you know them.”

“Emori?” Raven calls, jogging toward her. Bellamy follows, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Emori, what the hell are you doing here?”

Raven looks like she wants to hug Emori, but stops just shy of it. She regards Otan with pursed lips, as if he’s an unfamiliar math problem she despises having to solve. “You.”

Otan gives Raven a small, sarcastic wave. Emori fights the urge to smack him upside the head.

Bellamy catches up. He unwinds his scarf from around his neck and drapes it over Raven’s shoulders when she’s too caught up in inspecting Emori’s face to notice.

“Where have you been?” he asks Emori, his voice worried. From the way Raven is looking at Otan, Emori knows Raven thinks he had something to do with her sudden disappearance.

She remembers Raven’s email. She wonders why John didn’t tell her, or anyone, what had happened.

“She had to help me,” Otan says carefully. Everyone’s eyes turn to Emori. She wants to do something in defiance of their worry and concern, but she can’t think of anything that won’t make this whole thing worse.

“So you’re dragging her down with you, huh?” Raven snaps at him.

Otan looks stung. “Hey, no one asked-”

“Yeah,” Bellamy snaps. “No one asked. You’re older than her, correct?” Otan nods. “Then you are not her responsibility. She is _yours_.” He scoffs. “You’re the shittiest older brother I’ve ever seen.”

Otan takes two sharp steps forward, as if he’s going to take a swing at Bellamy, and Emori steps in with a loud, “HEY!”

Both men look at her. “Back off, Otan,” she snaps. She looks over her shoulder at Bellamy, feeling her stomach twist into a knot at the look of brotherly concern in his eyes. “Bellamy, you too.”

Bellamy takes a couple steps back. “I let it go when you showed up at the lake,” he tells Otan. “But you took her away from a good life back home, and that’s not what a brother does.”

“You don’t know shit about us,” Otan snaps. At this point, Emori’s tempted to step aside and let them have at each other. She locks eyes with Raven, then nearly laughs when they both roll their eyes in synch.

“No, but I know plenty about being an older brother,” Bellamy counters.

“I fucking hate privileged brats,” Otan grumbles, just loud enough for Bellamy to hear, and Raven lets out a surprised shout when Bellamy skirts around Emori to pin her brother against the brick wall, his hands on Otan’s shoulders.

“Bellamy!” Emori yelps, rushing forward to pull on his arm. “Let him go!”

“I raised my sister from the time she was ten years old,” Bellamy hisses in Otan’s face. “I never once made her feel guilty or beholden to me for it. I gave up countless things to make sure she was provided for and felt safe and loved. I did my damndest to make sure my mistakes _never_ affected her.” He shakes Otan’s shoulders. “You are doing none of that. She doesn’t deserve you, and you sure as hell do not deserve her. So don’t _fucking_ stand here and belittle me for worrying about your sister’s happiness and safety, because it’s more than I’ve ever seen you do.”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” Otan snarls.

“Otan.” Emori’s voice is loud and clear. Above them, the street lamps flicker on. “Stop.”

Footsteps echo in the alley. Emori and Otan’s heads whip toward the noise almost in synch. “You two have to go,” Emori murmurs to Raven, a spike of fear driving through her heart. “Now. Go now.”

“Why?” Bellamy asks, even as he releases Otan.

“Trust me,” Emori whispers.

Raven takes Bellamy’s scarf off her shoulders and throws it at him, turning to face Emori. “Emori, what’s going on?”

Emori steps closer. For some reason, she doesn’t want Otan to know this small thing. “Meet me downtown. The coffee shop on Third Street. Give me an hour.”

Raven nods, then yanks on Bellamy’s arm until he follows her back out into the street. No sooner do they disappear than Gideon appears from the shadows.

“You brought your brother,” he says, his deep voice void of emotion.

Emori squares her shoulders. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Gideon says nothing. Emori takes a deep breath. She feels herself settling into her old self again, into a skin made of lies and disguises and stories that hold only a small grain of truth. “That’s what I thought. Now,” she takes a step forward, “let’s talk.”

* * *

This time, Bellamy is the one who looks like he wants to hug Emori as she enters the coffee shop and approaches his and Raven’s table. From the look on both of their faces, she had recently been the topic of discussion. That thought leaves an unpleasant burn in her throat.

“Okay, talk,” Raven says the moment Emori sits down.

Emori blinks at Raven. Adrenaline is still singing in her veins, but she can’t find it in herself to harness it into crafting a believable lie.

So she does the unthinkable. She tells the truth. Well, most of it; she tells them about Otan’s call, the fear in his voice when he asked her for help, and her short-lived homecoming. At Raven’s insistence, she adds sparse details about her half-minded call to John, mostly to explain why Bellamy had to drive him to the train station, but also to purge the lingering ache and fear that haunted her at that moment. She needed someone, and she chose him.

 _He didn’t choose me_ , she thinks, unbidden. _He could have spent the night and left on good terms._

And just like that, the ache that makes her stomach shiver is back. Her heart crashes against her ribs; the space where it beats aches so badly she fights the urge to press her hand against her breastbone.

Raven has said something. Emori didn’t catch it. “What?”

“Why haven’t you emailed J back?” Raven asks again.

Emori feels her forehead crease. Her good hand flies to her neck. She touches the spot below her ear that always tingled when John kissed her neck. “Is he worried?”

“He’s…” Raven is obviously gauging what will make Emori feel the least guilty, searching for something that is enough to be true but not enough to make her hurt.

“He’s not sure how to handle it,” Bellamy interjects diplomatically. “I don’t think he understands what he’s feeling.”

“Do you?” Emori asks, half combative, half exhausted. She feels the ghost of John’s warm body pressed against her back, sees the hatred in his eyes when he walked away. She feels how John used to describe: detached from the world, hovering near the periphery of reality.

“I think you both are dealing with a lot,” Bellamy says, careful, measured. “He’s still dealing with the trauma from Ontari and his mother, and you’re dealing with your brother.”

Emori can’t help but bristle at the disdain on Bellamy’s face when he thinks of Otan even though, when she thinks of what Bellamy said, she knows he’s right.

_Damn it._

“Otan’s my family. He’s my responsibility.”

She’s gripping the edge of the table, she realizes. When she lets go, Raven reaches for her hand. “You’re shaking,” she murmurs.

Emori bites on her lower lip so hard she tastes blood. “I’m fine,” she mutters, trying to pull her hand back. Raven doesn’t let go.

“Emori.” Raven leans forward to look Emori in the eye. Her gaze is steady but her words fail her. Emori looks back, unwavering, hoping her own eyes say, _see? There is nothing for me now. I will always be trapped here. You should let me go. You should all just let me go._

Bellamy touches Raven’s elbow after that and tells her they need to go, they’ll miss their train. Nothing is settled and not everything has been said, but Emori watches them walk away nonetheless before wandering deeper into the rich part of the city, past the government buildings and the steel and wood apartment facades and all the shiny, ugly things about this city that she used to fantasize about burning to the ground.

The minutes pass by, littered with stoplights and tears on her cheeks, but she barely notices. She only stops when she reaches the very limits of downtown, and then she sits on the curb and watches the sun go down.

* * *

“Emori.”

Emori looks up from the gutter she’s been carefully studying for the past 45 minutes, but doesn’t turn around. “Jaha.”

The older man sits down next to her, extending his legs into the street and crossing them at the ankles. She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her chin there, avoiding his eyes.

“Gideon told me your meeting went well.”

“Yes.” Emori stands. She looks down at Jaha and sighs. Somewhere beyond this street, cicadas are screaming. A firefly flashes before her eyes.

She hates this man. He’s too placid, too delusional, and, worst of all, he took her brother from her long before any of this ever happened.

“Will your brother be returning to us?” Jaha asks carefully.

The question is a punch to the gut, a twist of a knife. “What?”

“You knew Otan was with me,” Jaha says evenly, looking up at her. She knows; she remembers Otan’s knife to her neck, her shaking voice telling him he has a choice: slit her throat and walk away, or come back to her.

Just thinking this, she wants nothing more than to put her fist through Jaha’s face.

“I didn’t know he still worked for you.” She didn’t, truly; the shock in her voice is real. There has been no evidence, no signs of tech with infinity symbols on them anywhere in the apartment.

“He’s been in and out of our ranks, yes, but he’s still one of us.” Jaha regards her placidly. “That was very brave, what you did for him.”

Rage rises up in Emori, threatening to choke her. “Fuck you,” she says, succinctly, and sprints home without a second thought.

The whole way there, her heart is beating out of her chest. She feels like either throwing up or screaming. She makes up her mind when she barges through the apartment door and slams straight into her brother.

“Otan!” she shouts, springing back from him as if he’s burned her. “You’re still working with Jaha?! On the ALIE project?!”

“You knew that!” He’s immediately on guard. He knew this was coming. “What the hell, Emori?”

“I knew you were working with him on the side, but you _never_ said a damn thing about the ALIE project,” she hisses. “You know how dangerous that is! That almost got you killed!” _You almost killed me._ “Why would you do that?”

“I had no choice,” he hisses. “We pissed Baylis’ crew off, and Jaha would keep me safe.”

“You left me for _him_?”

“You were in prison,” Otan argues. “You were safe! I was the one left to the fucking dogs!”

“I thought you left me for good!” Emori screams. “You stopped coming to visit! You stopped answering my calls and emails! You abandoned me!”

“Because Jaha said it was what was best!”

“Fuck you,” Emori seethes. She pushes past her brother, towards the bathroom, eager for a shower and a door that locks. “You chose him over me. That’s all there is to it.”

“Emori-” she hears Otan say, but the slam and lock of the door drowns out any more excuses.

She braces her hands on either side of the sink and regards her reflection in the mirror. She remembers another bathroom, two doors away from-

No. She won’t think about him.

She remembers shaking, spitting bile into a sink, crying into his-

 _No_!

“I’m going to bed, Em,” Otan says through the door. Emori can feel his hesitation, can hear his intake of breath, and breathes out a soft breath when he pads away.

She stays in there for a long while, staring into her own eyes, tracing her cheeks, her tattoo, her jawline, through the stains on the mirror. Eventually, she showers, wrapping herself in a ratty yellow towel she finds under the sink and inspecting her reflection, then what of her body she can see with her own eyes. Through the steam, she notes with interest, her bad hand looks like a root in a foggy forest.

When she was younger, she hated the sight of herself. Now, she’s resigned: resigned to the sadness in her eyes, resigned to the horrible things she’s done, resigned to the darkness forever tugging on the edges of her consciousness, hovering on the periphery of her brain.

She hates it. She can live like this, with her hand and her crimes and the horrible things she’s done, but she doesn’t want to.

The longer she stands still, the more restless she feels. She paces back and forth, walking the length of the bathroom, stopping at the small window across from the door that faces the train tracks and overlooks more apartment buildings, more broken homes, more jagged streets cutting through the city.

She remembers climbing the stairs to the train station, the stone in her stomach that disappeared when she saw him, remembers the sharp and sweet ache that settled in her bones every time she looked at those eyes, that sharp mouth, those desperate hands.

She bursts from the bathroom before she even realizes she’s moving and races to the side of the bed, where her backpack and a small pile of dirty clothes.

She finds it: John’s thermal sweatshirt. She’d forgotten she was wearing it when she left the house, and she clings to it now, despite the rapidly-deteriorating rational part of her brain that screams at her to get rid of it, to forget, to _let go, damn it._

As she retreats back to the bathroom, she grabs her phone and types in a number with shaky fingers. The small screen tells her that it’s nearly two in the morning. How long can she keep doing this: living in these disjointed, early hours, processing the things that hurt with an exhausted mind?

“Hello?”

She holds John’s shirt to her chest. The fabric is soft. It smells like Raven’s house, like John’s blankets, like a cold fall night. “I did my part,” she says softly. Her voice sounds like gravel. “He’s...I...” She takes a shuddering breath. “I want to come home.”

“You can.” John’s voice is unreadable. “I’m not stopping you.”

“I won’t do it unless you want me to.”

She can’t see him, but she can tell that something inside him is breaking. “Can I come get you?”

In the mirror, Emori sees herself smile. “Tomorrow. Just so I can say goodbye.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't put up a chapter limit for this fic yet bc I'm running out of poem excerpts, but not ideas, so who knows what this will become? I sure don't.  
> Anyway, feedback is appreciated. Thank you for stopping by :)


	10. Anything I Wanted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re crazy!” John shouts. She tilts her head down to look at him. Her hair plasters to her cheeks. “Emori, get back here!”
> 
> “Or what?” She spins in the rain, laughing. Later, she’ll be freezing, shivering and desperate for warmth, but right now, she craves the cold.
> 
>  _I’m going to be okay_ , she tells herself as the train roars past, its push and pull of wind soaking her even more. _This will all be okay._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We finally have a chapter end count! Wow!
> 
> Thank you to [Megan](http://bombshellsandbluebells.tumblr.com) for her tireless editing. <3
> 
> There's a TW in this chapter for canon-compliant ableism.

_ We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,  _ _   
_ _ smiling and crying in a way that made me  _ _   
_ _ even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I  _ _   
_ _ just couldn’t say it out loud.  _ _   
_ __ Actually, you said  Love, for you,    
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s    
terrifying. No one    
will ever want to sleep with you.

* * *

  **Then**

_ “Otan!” Emori shouts, banging her way into the basement, nearly falling down the last two steps, her feet sliding in her too-big boots. “Otan, get your ass out of bed! I hit the jackpot!” _

_ “‘S too early,” Otan grumbles, pulling the moth-eaten blanket over his head. “Why are you so loud?” _

_ “I’m not loud,” Emori says. “You’re hungover.” She pulls out a package of day-old buns and a jar of generic peanut butter. “I got breakfast!” _

_ “Breakfast?” Otan sat up. “Thought we didn’t have money for that.” _

_ Emori shrugs. “Made a deal.” _

_ Otan looks at her mistrustfully, but shuffles out of bed nonetheless, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders like a cape. She slaps some peanut butter on a roll and takes a big bite, hoping it will soothe the ache in her stomach. _

_ “Don’t forget about me,” Otan grumbles. _

_ Emori give him a cheeky smile. “Couldn’t if I tried,” she mumbles around a mouthful. “Make your own breakfast. And clean up. You smell like alcohol.” _

* * *

**Now**

Otan seems to know that Emori is going to leave, even before she says anything.

“I kinda figured,” he says gently, ruffling her hair. “This life isn’t yours anymore, Em. I don’t know if jail did something to you, or if it was that kid, but…” He trails off, stares past her for a long moment. “You belong somewhere else now.”

Tears fill her eyes. She wraps her arms around her torso to keep herself from breaking. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Otan stuffs his hands in his pockets - a boyish, uncomfortable gesture. “I left you first.”

It hangs there. Brother and sister regard one another. Emori wants to hug him, but something in her balks at the idea. She can tell he wants to say something, but he won’t. Neither of them ever do.

She shoulders her backpack. She’s wearing John’s thermal sweatshirt. The fabric chafes against her neck. The sleeve bulges awkwardly over her bad hand. “I’ll call you,” she says softly. 

Otan nods. She turns to the door. This feels final, like a door closing, a lock twisting shut and rusting there. 

“Try not to forget about me,” Otan says suddenly, an echo of a past life, of a girl she supposes she isn’t anymore.

She smiles, carefully, but she doesn’t look back. “Couldn’t if I tried.”

* * *

John is standing outside the apartment building, pacing back and forth, running his hands through his hair. It’s shorter now, and he has more facial hair. It’s not a bad look, all things considered. She hopes it means that he’s taking care of himself, even though she knows there’s a high possibility that Raven just sat him down and chopped off his hair with safety scissors.

That’s not a bad idea, she thinks, absently fingering the dry ends of her long hair. Then, John turns to look at her, and she can’t think at all.

“Hey,” he says in a tone trying too hard to be casual. Despite herself, she feels a grin creep over her face. “What?”

“You came,” she says softly. “I didn’t-”

She’s about to say something else, but before she can take a breath, he’s running to her, sweeping one of her arms up over his shoulder and wrapping her in a hug.

“John,” she gasps, burying her face in his shoulder. His arms are tight around her, one around her shoulders and the other around her waist. She can feel him shaking.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs in his ear, squeezing his shoulder. “I’m okay.”

He nods into her shirt, then pulls away to look down at her. “Where’s your jacket?”

She curls her good hand into his sweatshirt that she’s wearing. “This is warm enough.”

He scoffs, shakes his head and starts shrugging off his coat. When he offers it to her, he doesn’t meet her eyes, but she puts it on anyway.

There’s a wall that’s gone up between them, swift and sudden. As quickly as he embraced her, he has shut her out. She fights the urge to do the same, instead choosing to lead him toward the train station, her backpack swishing against the cool nylon of John’s jacket.

They stand on the elevated platform nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. A neon sign hanging from the ceiling announces that their train is 30 minutes away and apt to be delayed because of an incoming storm. There’s a few people milling around, hiding in the shadows, sitting under the overhang, afraid of the promised rain.

A gust of wind blows through, whipping around the platform. Beside her, John stiffens, shivers. His closeness is terrifying; she has to stop herself from leaning into his warmth. His eyes are closed against the cold wind. When he opens them, they’re bright, as if with tears.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks, her voice creaking like broken floorboards. “What’s wrong?”

He looks away from her. “Nothing.” He shivers again.

“Do you want your jacket back?” she asks, already preparing to shrug it off.

“I don’t-” he starts to snap, then catches himself. “No.”

Impatience and anger rear their ugly heads in her. “What’s your problem, John?” she asks.

“Nothing!” His eyes are scared, his posture defensive. As thunder rumbles overhead, she realizes that he is afraid of her.

She backs up, standing under the overhang as rain starts to drizzle over them. John follows her, shoving his hands in his pockets so hard she’s surprised a seam doesn’t rip.

“John,” she says again, stepping forward and ducking to meet his eyes. “John, talk to me.”

“You can’t just stay when it works for you,” he says softly. His eyes are still bitter, but there’s sadness behind the blue fire. “You can’t come back and leave whenever you want. You freaked Raven out. Jasper missed you.”

“Oh, sure, this is about Raven and Jasper,” Emori scoffs. There’s a fist closing around her lungs. It’s wringing the life from them slowly but surely. “It couldn’t possibly be about you.”

“Shut up!” John shouts. She flinches back, and two bystanders turn to stare. The rain comes down harder. “You don’t get to blame this on me! You left me!”

“And now you’re punishing me for it?” Emori cries. “You said you understood! You said you wanted me to come home!”

“I didn’t say I’d make it easy,” he growls, taking a hasty step forward so they’re chest-to-chest. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t hate you for it.”

“Tell me to leave, John,” she breathes.  _ Beg me to stay. _

He kisses her instead. When they break apart, he makes a sound like a wounded animal. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re going to have to figure your shit out,” she whispers, her head spinning, her lips still feeling the ghost of his mouth. “I won’t let you talk to me like that again.”

He smirks down at her. “You going to punish me?”

The rain is pouring down now, soaking the pavement and sending wafts of mist under the overhang. Emori sees beads of it shimmering on her glove when she shoves his chest. “Shut up, John.”

He catches her bad hand, holds it close, lifts it to cup his cheek and kiss the wrapped palm. She feels her face fall and her eyes harden. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” John asks, kissing the palm again.

“That.” She tugs her hand free.

“It deserves love too,” he murmurs, reaching for her good hand. Emori doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says nothing. Instead, she takes off John’s jacket and hands it to him. She steps back into the rain, tips her head up to the sky, and lets the cold water sting her face like tears.

“You’re crazy!” John shouts. She tilts her head down to look at him. Her hair plasters to her cheeks. “Emori, get back here!”

“Or what?” She spins in the rain, laughing. Later, she’ll be freezing, shivering and desperate for warmth, but right now, she craves the cold.

_ I’m going to be okay,  _ she tells herself as the train roars past, its push and pull of wind soaking her even more.  _ This will all be okay _ .

* * *

They both cry on the train on the way home. Emori, from joy, the salt dripping into her mouth, mixing with the rain falling from her hair; John for reasons she doesn’t understand.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him, breathless, her tears giving way to a kind of soft joy.

He wipes his eyes, though there are no tears. He cries like she used to: silent and without a trace. “If you say ‘nothing’,” Emori says, teasing, “I’ll kick you into tomorrow.”

“I don’t know,” he says softly. The train is dark and empty. Rain lashes at the windows. Emori scoots over to be nearer to him. Despite her wet clothes, he leans on her shoulder.

“Love, for you,” he murmurs, almost to himself, “isn’t the usual kind of love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.” 

She frowns. As if of its own accord, her good hand flies up to stroke his hair. “I scare you.” She means it as a question. It sounds more like an accusation.

He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah.”

She sighs. He stays there, on her shoulder. Her arm starts to go numb. She doesn’t ask him to move.

When they pull into the station outside their college campus - is it still hers, Emori wonders; is any of this still hers? - Raven is there, leaning against the hood of Bellamy’s car, arms crossed, good foot tapping on the ground. Her shadow is harsh in the street lamp above her. At the sight, Emori feels the knot in her stomach tense and tighten.

_ This is it _ , she tells herself as she shoulders her bag and shakes John awake.  _ She won’t let me come home. Emails be damned. _

Home. She nearly shakes herself, self-corrects.  _ Come back. _

“Hey, Reyes,” John says easily, not even flinching when Raven rockets straight past him to wrap Emori in a bruising hug.

“Don’t ever fucking scare me like that again,” Raven murmurs, rubbing Emori’s back with her hand.

Emori fights the urge to rest her forehead on Raven’s shoulder and cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and waits for the rejection.

Raven pulls back just slightly and brushes a strand of hair from Emori’s face. “It’s okay. You’re home now. Lexa wanted to go through your stuff for clues, but I drew the line.”

John rolls his eyes. “You were this close to doing it, too.”

Raven shrugs. “Just wanted to make sure she was okay-“ She stops and twirls a lock of Emori’s hair in her fingers. “Wait, why are you wet?”

John snorts. Emori starts to explain, but is cut off when Raven hugs her again, then ushers her toward the car.

“Tell me later,” she says, fussing just like Otan would, like Bellamy would too, probably. “We need to get you dry.”

John mutters something Emori doesn’t hear. Raven does; she turns around in her seat and smacks him on the leg. John kicks her seat, and Emori retaliates by throwing the tissue box on the floor near her feet at John’s torso.

“I’ll have to tell Bellamy I did end up needing a car tissue box,” Raven says drily, and the three of them speed home.

* * *

 “Why did you leave?”

Emori jumps at the sound of Octavia’s voice. She’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed loosely over her chest. “Everyone was worried. You had all of this, and you threw it away. Why?”

Emori sighs and kicks her now-empty backpack under the bed. “It’s a long story,” she sighs.

“Is it?” Octavia steps into the room. She and Emori are about the same height, but there’s something about the younger girl that makes her seem that much more imposing. “Because from where I stand, you put yourself ahead of the people that love you enough to want to keep you here.”

Emori takes a careful step forward. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t have done the same if it was your brother?” Octavia frowns. “If it was Bellamy?”

“Bellamy wouldn’t have asked me to,” Octavia nearly snarls.

“That’s the point!” Emori shouts. “You have no fucking idea how damn lucky you are! Your brother would do  _ anything  _ for you.” She remembers Bellamy’s tirade in the alley, his furious face inches from her brother’s impassive eyes. “He would never leave you; he would never ask you to forget about the things you want to help him fix his mistakes.”

She’s run out of tears, but her throat feels tight as if she’s about to cry. “You don’t understand,” she says softly, a broken thing. Octavia’s eyes soften incrementally the longer she stands there.

“I’m sure your brother loves you,” Octavia says quietly. She looks chastised, or at least a little guilty. “In his own way.”

“He does.” Emori nods, sniffles a little bit. “But…”

Octavia cocks her head. A frown creases the skin between her eyes. Behind her, Emori sees another person’s shadow, hovering in the hall.

“He didn’t choose me,” Emori says, finally, throat tight. “There was something he wanted more.”

There’s nothing left to say. Octavia leaves the room with a soft sound that Emori doesn’t have the energy to identify.

The shadow in the hall is Bellamy’s. He enters the room quietly, gently. “I told her not to talk to you like that,” he says, apologetically. 

Emori shakes her head. The lump in her throat widens. “It’s okay.”

“That was nice,” Bellamy gestures to the room, “what you said about me.”

“It’s true.” Emori’s voice cracks, because what wouldn’t she give for her brother to care just a little bit more and in a little bit of a different way?

“Oh, come here,” Bellamy murmurs, reaching for Emori, hugging her by the shoulders and letting her sniffle, once, into the soft cotton of his shirt. “It’s okay.”

She doesn’t have words for the comfort she needs, but Bellamy doesn’t seem to mind. She closes her eyes and tentatively hugs him back, her arms around his torso.

“Aww, you didn’t invite me?” Raven leans against the doorframe, grinning slightly. Bellamy reaches his free arm out for Raven, who joins the hug, resting her chin on Emori’s shoulder and placing her hand carefully atop Emori’s bad one.

“You okay?” she murmurs in Emori’s ear. When Emori nods, Raven squeezes her hand. “We’ve got you.”

“Damn right.” Emori can’t see over Raven’s head, but she knows that’s Jasper, and, judging from the footsteps, Monty too. The boys join the group hug, hanging on even when Bellamy staggers forward under Jasper’s exuberant weight.

Emori has to laugh at Bellamy’s soft  _ oof _ . “I’m fine,” she says softly.

“We know,” Monty says, patting her awkwardly on the head, the only part of her he can reach. “Doesn’t mean we can’t be here for you anyway.”

Emori doesn’t know what to say to that either. She stands there, encased in a knot of her roommates’ love and care, and lets them decide when to let go.

* * *

 Something has shifted in the house’s atmosphere. It’s as if Emori’s absence, however short, has torn a hole in things that is now mending. Emori isn’t sure how true that is, but she is sure that there have never been this many people in the kitchen at one time.

“Get out!” John shoves Bellamy away from the fridge. “Sit down on the bar stool next to Emori or get the fuck out of my way. Your choice.”

Bellamy retrieves a beer and hastens to the living room, where Octavia, Monty, Jasper and Luna are duking it out over Mario Kart. Emori smiles at John when his back is to her. Lexa lets herself in from the backyard and gives Emori a knowing look.

“You two would be cute together,” Lexa whispers in Emori’s ear. Emori swats her on the arm without thinking about it; Lexa’s surprised laugh carries through the whole house as she goes to answer the door.

“Huh, what do you know?” a young man asks, kicking off his shoes and dropping a bag of potato chips on the counter. “She does have a personality.”

“Leave her alone,” John says, and then proceeds to glare at his back until he plops down on the rug in front of the TV.

“Who is he?” Emori asks, frowning.

“That’s Zeke Shaw.” The name sounds mean in John’s mouth. “I think he’s into Raven.”

“He’s cute.” Emori appraises him. His eyes are earnest and he has the set jaw and close-cut hair of a military man. He looks like he could handle Raven, or at least, make sure she can handle herself. “Objectively.”

“Well, yeah, but…” John sighs. The kitchen timer goes off. “I don’t want her to get hurt. Again.”

The set of his shoulders tell her the same sentiment applies to himself.

* * *

 “I met Zeke when I came to find you in the city.”

Emori jumps at the sound of John’s voice from the bathroom doorway. She spits some toothpaste in the sink and rinses her toothbrush. “Oh.” 

“I saw you watching him,” he clarifies. “Figured you should know he’s not a total stranger.”

“Only a slight stranger, then,” Emori says, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. John doesn’t return it, so she lets it drop and bends over to put away her toothpaste and hide the sadness of her eyes.

_ He won’t forgive you,  _ she tells herself.  _ Stop trying to earn it. _

“Do you regret coming for me?” she asks, voice small, echoing slightly in the bathroom. She remembers holding herself up, arms stiff, mouth bitter, and remembers him tucking her into bed, holding her, lending her his shirt and some of his strength.

Her stomach rolls at the memory. That was where all the horrible things began.

“No,” John whispers, like it’s a bitter confession. “I don’t.” He laughs, sharp. “I probably should. But I don’t.”

She regards him in the mirror. It’s safer that way, a pane of glass separating the two of them, their words and all the things that split them before they even had a chance to come together.

“Can we start over?” John asks, in a rush. That question, and her answer, goes against both of their nature.

“Yes,” she says, and he smiles.

* * *

“You know,” Raven begins around a mouthful of food, “you’re pretty good at that.”

Emori looks up from Monty’s laptop. Or, at least, the shell of it. She’s installing a hard drive with more storage, although, from the looks of it, she should probably just build him his own gaming computer. “Oh. Thanks.”

“You should take a computer engineering class,” Raven continues, either undeterred by, or oblivious to, Emori’s standoffish reaction. “You wouldn’t be half bad.”

Emori gestures with her bad hand. “Can’t fix things properly with this.”

Raven raises an eyebrow. “You’re using it fine now.” She shrugs. “I walk funny. People might stare, but it doesn’t stop me. It shouldn’t stop you either.”

Emori blinks. She’d never considered that: that her appearance may not immediately disqualify her from something. After all, it had disqualified her from her mother’s love and from belonging. But maybe…

“Sure,” she says, genuinely. “I’ll look into it.”

Raven grins. “Hell, yeah.”

She does look into it. Fall turns into almost-winter, and she thinks and plans and crams for finals and works long nights to make sure she catches up from her unplanned hiatus. She even goes on a couple dates with John. They turn out better than the first one did; he takes her to the park for a chilly picnic, and they get tipsy and crunch fall leaves in their hands, their conversation evaporating with their breath in the air. He takes her dancing at some lame college event, and she surprises him, and herself, by wearing a dress.

Her favorite date is right before finals season: they stay in his room, and she helps him write out more poems to tape to his walls. There’s something strangely permanent about her writing in his space.

_ Love, for you,  _ she writes, as careful as she can,  _ is not the usual kind of love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you. _

He hangs that above his bed. Later, he kisses her as they lay below it.

* * *

 

The closer it gets to Thanksgiving, the more tense the house gets, thanks to finals and finals-induced stress. Jasper and Monty are at one another’s throats, John cuts back on the drinking to concentrate, but makes everyone miserable because of it, and Emori takes to sleeping in Raven’s room so Raven actually goes to bed at a halfway decent time.

“I like you,” Raven mumbles, half asleep. The clock reads 3:14 p.m. “You’re a good kid.”

Emori laughs drowsily. “I’m older than you.”

“Fuck if I know,” Raven says around a yawn. Emori’s heart warms.

The three-day break for the holiday is a welcome reprieve; even Jasper, an underachiever by his own admission, welcomes the break from studying. John wants to celebrate with a party, but they’re all so wiped out that they spend the day before Thanksgiving napping and watching the worst-rated movies on Netflix.

Emori didn’t even think they were going to celebrate the holiday until John hauls a massive turkey out of the freezer the night before.

“What...the fuck?” Octavia asks, eyes wide. “When did you buy a turkey?”

John shrugs. “You know. Whenever.”

“That’s Not an answer,” Octavia says. “And yes-”

“The capital letters are implied in your tone,” Raven and Lexa say in unison and in monotone. Emori hides a smile. Some things never change.

John bastes and roasts the turkey. Every time he says the turkey is roasting, Raven gets a shit-eating grin on her face that Octavia tries to wipe off by throwing pillows, papers and a magazine at her head. At some point between breakfast and a half-hearted lunch, Harper, Zeke, Luna and Bellamy come over, bearing mashed potatoes, corn casserole, green beans and pumpkin pie, respectively.

“What is that?” Lexa asks, poking Zeke’s glass pan with a finger.

“Corn casserole,” Zeke says, his head inside the fridge.

“Corn what?”

His head pops up almost comically fast. “You don’t know what corn casserole is?!” Lexa shakes her head. “Shame,” Zeke mutters, and spends the next five minutes unsuccessfully attempting to open his beer.

Monty tries to steal John’s steak knives three separate times. The fourth time, he succeeds, and Emori can’t suppress her laughter at John’s howl of rage when he sees his prize knife strapped to the roomba.

“GIVE ME THE KNIFE BACK!” he shouts. “Monty, I’m gonna drop-kick that piece of shit out the front door.”

“Hey!” Jasper picks up the object and cradles it to his chest dramatically. “Don’t insult Stabby.”

“If you call that thing ‘Stabby’ one more time, I’m gonna take you out,” Harper promises, stepping over Jasper and plopping onto the couch next to Monty. Emori wiggles her eyebrows at Raven over Monty’s head when the boy’s cheeks start to flush.

John doesn’t stop fussing over the turkey until Bellamy steals his apron and baster and shoos him out of the kitchen to set the table. He does, in proper form no less, and Emori sneaks behind him and messes up the silverware until John catches her.

“Saboteur,” he calls her, grabbing her around the middle and tickling her sides. 

“John, stop!” she says, laughing, squirming away from him and nearly smacking her shoulder on the peninsula. She knocks over one of the bar stools and almost kicks a passing Zeke in the shins. “Seriously!”

John releases her just as the doorbell rings. “How many more people can we fit in this house?” he wonders aloud as Bellamy goes to answer the door. 

“How many people can we fit at this table?” Lexa asks, gesturing to the makeshift banquet table that consists of the dining room table, two card tables, a large coffee table with cushions for sitting, and Raven’s desk.

“Hopefully three more,” Bellamy says, leading Echo, Clarke Griffin and Costia into the house. Echo immediately gravitates to Raven and Harper, while Clarke stays close to Bellamy and Costia hovers near John’s elbow as he carves the turkey.

“Can I have a drumstick?” she asks John, who nods. “I can help if you want.”

“That’s Emori’s man, Costia,” Octavia yells over her brother’s shoulder. “You’ve got your own woman!”

“And a fine one I am,” Lexa snarks. Luna swats at her. “What? I’m hot.”

Somehow, Bellamy and John navigate the chaos and get everyone settled at the table. They pause for grace - mostly for Zeke, Raven grumbles - then dig in. Emori stuffs herself on turkey and cranberries - and Zeke’s casserole, which isn’t half bad - and on the laughter and kindness of her friends that fills her to the brim.

* * *

 

“I want to try something,” John says softly, his head resting on her stomach. They’re in her bed, nestled under blankets, watching the first snow of the season from her window.

“Okay,” she murmurs, continuing to card her good fingers through John’s hair. When he lifts his head, her hand falls from the top of his head to the nape of his neck. “Whatever you want.”

He kisses her, soft, and she lets him; she tangles her good fingers in his hair again, but lets out a tiny huff of breath when his tongue swipes over her bottom lip.

“Sorry-” he says, breaking away. “I didn’t-”

“You’re fine!” she’s fast to reassure him. It’s like ripping off a BandAid, she realizes. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

“I said I wanted to try something,” he says, grumpy and cheeky.

She shoves at his shoulder as he moves closer. “Shut up,” she says, but she’s laughing right until the moment their lips connect. This time, he deepens the kiss almost instantly, and she lets him. She loses herself in it, in the soft way he bites at her lower lip, the careful press of his tongue, the gasp he makes when she sighs against his mouth.

“That was nice,” she murmurs when he breaks away, propping himself on his elbow and looking down at her. His hand strokes over her hair. “What was it for?”

He shrugs. Suddenly, he can’t meet her eyes. “What if you leave again?” he says, softly, the guilt in his eyes at that question palpable. “I want to do the things I regret not doing.” He winces. “That’s so fucking cheesy.”

Emori shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, shame and sadness piercing her heart. “It’s not.”


	11. The Parts That I Remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m sorry,” he says softly. A tear falls over his cheek and lands on his arm. “I shouldn’t have said any of that.”
> 
> “No,” she murmurs, looking up at him. Just like the first time they met, he’s trapped by her eyes. “You shouldn’t have.”
> 
> “Can I convince you to stay?”
> 
> She sighs. “No. But you can show me why I should.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hah yeah, remember when I said I was deleting this fic?
> 
> I'm sorry about that, guys. I was in a bad place from about mid-August until about a week ago. I'm sure I'll dip back down eventually, but that's neither here nor there.
> 
> If you're still around, I hope you like this chapter. Only one more left before the end :)

_ You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together  _ _   
_ _ to make a creature that will do what I say  _ _   
_ _ or love me back.  _ _   
_ _ I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not  _ _   
_ _ feeding yourself to a bad man  _ _   
_ __ against a black sky prickled with small lights.

* * *

 

Murphy would like to pretend he’s not spiraling, but unfortunately, that isn’t much of an option right now.

Raven is noticing. So is Monty, though he doesn’t say anything, and so is Octavia, which means Bellamy knows. Luna figures it out soon after, and, because Lexa isn’t an idiot, she realizes too. Jasper and Emori are the only two in their group of friends - save for Zeke, who doesn’t know any better, and Costia, who stays out of it - who have no idea.

He likes it that way, if he’s honest. He doesn’t have the energy to explain that the thrill of Emori’s return has worn off, and with that disappearance has come the old familiar fears that he will be alone forever, that no one will ever really want him, that it will always be better to be alone then to have another person leave. That fear only intensifies every time Emori inserts herself into Raven’s conversations, joins Monty and Jasper on the quest to steal his kitchen knives, studies with Octavia and Lexa. She’s a perfect puzzle piece, and he’s a jagged piece of glass trying to fit. 

Somehow, despite his downward trajectory, he manages to pass all his finals, and the whole house celebrates that no one failed out of college with a raucous night of drinking and terrible movies. For once, Murphy doesn’t participate in the former, although he does sit through the latter.

“You don’t want any?” Emori asks during a break between movies, taking a tiny sip of the ungodly alcoholic concoction Jasper made for her. The Christmas lights Raven put up the morning after Thanksgiving sparkle in her eyes.

Murphy shakes his head. “I’m good.”

Emori puts her cup down on the coffee table and inspects the contents. “Maybe I should take a page from your book,” she says. “This doesn’t look totally safe.”

“It probably isn’t,” Murphy says. He tries for a casual tone, but it falls flat. Worry flits through Emori’s eyes.  _ Let it go,  _ he pleads with her silently, but he knows better, knows that she won’t drop something as small as a shift in his tone.

Sure enough, she stands up. “Let’s go outside,” she says, catching his hand as she steps past him and tugging him out the door.

There’s a thin layer of frost on the concrete blocks that serve as Raven’s back patio. Murphy scuffs his shoes on the pavement, disrupting the delicate pattern of crystals. Emori wraps her arms around her torso - a gesture that means she’s cold, insecure or both, Murphy’s come to realize - and looks up at him. “What’s wrong, John?”

He expects her confrontation to be accusing, not soft, and he’s so taken aback by the care in her eyes that he forgets to answer for a moment. There’s still time to back out, he tells himself. There’s still time to repair the cracks in his own psyche without dragging her down with him.

When he answers her, it’s with a feeble, “Nothing.”

Emori scoffs a little. “Bullshit.”

“What do you want me to say?” He’s not angry. He just sounds like it. He doesn’t really feel much these days.

He pictures her standing in the kitchen with Raven, laughing with Monty and Harper, cautiously allowing Bellamy and Echo to help her move the furniture in her room so her bed is against the window. She invited him into every one of those spaces, but something always held him back. Something always keeps him from what he wants. Raven would say it’s himself. He would argue it’s his own failures as a human being.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Emori says. Her eyes plead with him.

_ The closer you get to the others, the farther you’ll get from me,  _ is what he wants to say. “I’m thinking it’s cold as balls out here,” is what he actually says.

Emori scoffs again, this time with frustration. “Ever since I came back, you’ve been-” She starts a little bit, looks him up and down with a quick flick of her eyes. “Is it me? Did I do something to-”

Murphy cuts her off because he loves her, even as he knows he’s losing her. “No. It’s not you.”

She nods, squares her shoulders as if to steady herself. “Then what?”

Of course she won’t let it go. “Just fucking let it go already,” he snaps, and Emori recoils as if he’s struck her. “Go back inside to your friends.” He spits the last word.

“They’re your friends too.” She says it defiantly, stepping closer so they’re almost literally nose-to-nose. “What’s going on with you, John?”

“You know what,” he says, because what the hell, he’s numb anyway, and he’s not even drunk. How much could this hurt? “Maybe it is you. Maybe I’m just pissed off that you came back and just...just took over, like everything is fine.”

Emori looks stung. Murphy knows he should care, but all he can concentrate on is how, for the first time in months, he feels something. “John, what-”

“You can’t take everything away,” he tells her. He’s not drunk, but he feels like he is. He’s hot, then cold, and the whole world is tilting on its axis. “You can’t take over me and Raven and the house and-”

“You’re jealous.” Her statement makes him stop cold. There are tears sparkling in her eyes. “You’re jealous.”

“Damn right. Everyone likes you, and you left. I don’t even have that, and I’ve been here the whole time.”

Emori’s mouth snaps shut. She turns on her heel and stalks inside. In the time it takes for him to catch his breath, a cold wave of fear that has nothing to do with the weather washes over him. 

“Shit!” he shouts into the darkness before bursting back through the kitchen door.

“She went upstairs,” Raven says from the living room. Murphy wastes no time in following her. “J, what-?”

He ignores her. He takes the stairs two at a time, nearly tripping over the top stair, and all but careens down the hall and into her bedroom.

The door is open. Emori’s standing in the middle of her room, her hands over her face, her shoulders trembling. From where he’s standing, it looks like she’s sinking her teeth into one of the smaller fingers of her left hand.

“Hey,” he whispers, or tries to. His voice sounds like gravel. “Emori. Stop. Don’t do that.”

“What the hell do you care?” she snarls, turning to him. One of her fingers has teeth marks in it. Murphy sees them when her hand falls to her side. “Get out, John.”

“Emori-”

“NO!” She shouts, actually  _ screams, _ and Murphy hears the entire house fall silent at once. Costia’s barely-there footsteps on the stairs, followed by Raven’s laborious ones, don’t deter him from meeting Emori’s eyes. “Get OUT!”

She takes a step toward him and, automatically, he flinches. “Emori, why-”

“You don’t get to say that to me!” she hisses. Her voice is livid, but her hands are trembling. “You don’t get to stand there and tell me that I deserve how you’re treating me just because I’m making a home for myself and you’re still punishing yourself for things you can’t let go.”

“That’s not-”

She shakes her head. “Yes. It is. Think, John. You know that’s why.” She scoffs. “You’re just like him. Neither of you really want me to have this.”

“Have what?” All of a sudden, Murphy remembers her standing in a park, flinching as her brother tells her she’ll never have a future. The memory stabs him in the gut. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Emori whispers. “ _ Oh _ .”

They regard one another for a long moment. Murphy can hear the rustle of Costia’s skirt and Raven’s uneven breathing. They’re both standing in the doorway, he guesses, or at least, waiting on the other side of it.

“Get right with yourself,” Emori says finally. Her voice cracks. “Then come back to me.”

She turns away. It feels like a door is slamming shut. He wants to rewind time and undo what he said on the patio, but that won’t heal the wound that’s been festering in him far longer than he’d care to admit.

He leaves the room. He goes into his own and lets the tears stinging his eyes fall.

* * *

He has a choice. The choice is simple, but the emotions they evoke are not. He can either burrow into his inadequacy or he can allow Emori, Raven and whatever forces exist outside of him to pull him kicking and screaming into the right side of humanity.

“You’re an idiot,” Octavia succinctly informs him as he makes breakfast twelve mornings after his fight with Emori.

Case in point.

Raven throws a spatula at her from across the kitchen, nearly hitting Murphy in the side of the head in the process. “What?” Octavia protests. “He is!”

“This is bigger than Emori,” Luna says sagely from the armchair in the living room. Murphy turns to glare at her over his shoulder. “Isn’t it?”

“I’m not incriminating myself,” Murphy says drily, swiveling on his bar stool to face Raven, who’s raising an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“It is, though,” she murmurs. Octavia is across the room now, so only he can hear her. Briefly, his mind flashes back to high school, when he and Raven would mouth words through one of their kitchen windows, silently asking if the other one was okay, or if they needed rescuing from their mother.

Murphy’s eyes flit to the window over the kitchen sink. The cinder block he used to stand on in middle school is long gone, but he swears he can see echoes of his face, aging over time, always worried about his best friend, always wondering if this would be the night she starved to death.

“Why do you still live here?” he asks suddenly, seeking a distraction, and also truthful answers. “After all the shit your mom put you through here, why didn’t you just offload the house?”

Raven looks taken-aback. “It wasn’t worth it,” she says after a moment. “There’s a bedroom on the first floor, the place was paid for, and it was near college and town. I didn’t want to leave. Plus,” she gestures around the room, “you guys.”

“Even after…” Murphy trails off, the implication of her mother’s death hanging there like a weighted curtain.

Raven sighs. “Yeah.” She shrugs. “Mom isn’t here anymore. I do what I want.”

Murphy can’t fathom that kind of actualization. If the tables were turned and he was still at his parents’ house, he thinks he would’ve burned the whole place down.

He hears a tiny creak on the stairs and turns just in time to see a piece of Emori’s green jacket disappear into the shadows. He wants to follow her. His hands ache for her. He balls them into fists, studies the calendar on the fridge, the one that announced her impending arrival what feels like months ago, just for something to do.

Then, he sees it.  _ Emori Moves Out.  _ There, three weeks away, right before the start of the semester, written innocuously in small red letters.

“What the hell?” he asks, then says it louder when he can’t hear himself over the blood rushing in his ears. “What the hell, Raven?”

“What?” She seems confused, a little irritated, until she follows his gaze. “Oh.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?” Murphy sounds stung, petulant even.

Raven’s eyes are sad when she looks at him. “It wasn’t mine to tell.”

* * *

 When Murphy knocks on Emori’s door, he doesn’t expect her to answer. When she does, he’s surprised to feel his mouth go dry.

“You’re moving out,” is all he says after a moment of her staring at him, eyebrow raised, waiting for whatever he thought was important enough to say.

It dawns on him that she probably isn’t hoping for an apology. That hurts him more than anything.

“Yes,” she answers, softly. “I don’t think I should be here anymore.”

She moves to close the door. Murphy reaches for her wrist before she can. “Please,” he whispers, eyes stinging, heart aching. “Please don’t go.”

Her eyes widen. She stares at the place where they touch when she says, “Why? All I do is take everything away, apparently.”

Her voice holds equal parts venom and exhaustion. Murphy doesn’t let go of her arm. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. A tear falls over his cheek and lands on his arm. “I shouldn’t have said any of that.”

“No,” she murmurs, looking up at him. Just like the first time they met, he’s trapped by her eyes. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Can I convince you to stay?”

She sighs. “No. But you can show me why I should.”

* * *

He tries. He puts away the paralysis and comfort that accompany his self-destructive desires, and he tries. For her, because he doesn’t want her to leave, he tries.

He forces himself into a routine. Wake up at eight, do housework and help Raven, cook lunch, read a little, watch a movie with Octavia, help Bellamy with dinner. The surprise on Emori’s face when she realizes he’s in a practiced habit of doing things, of playing nice and working hard, is worth it.

“That’s not why you should be doing this,” Luna informs him on Christmas Eve morning. She slept over last night, or so Murphy thinks - he can’t keep straight who Raven’s fucking, and it doesn’t really matter as long as they don’t cheat like that fucker Finn - and she looks more comfortable sipping from his chipped blue coffee mug than he ever did. “You should be doing this for you.”

“You and your masters in psychology can shove it,” he grumbles, even as he spoons scrambled eggs onto three plates and hands one to Luna. “Reyes! Breakfast!”

Raven appears in the kitchen with a clatter and a litany of curses. Her brace strap is caught on a metal rivet. Before Murphy can divest himself of the plates, Emori appears at Raven’s side, speeding down from the stairs and skidding into the kitchen on sock feet.

“I got it,” Emori grunts, disentangling Raven and patting her on the back. “You’re good.”

“Thanks,” Raven sighs, shoving hair out of her face. “I probably could go without it but-“

“No!” Luna, Murphy and Emori all say in unison. Luna laughs shortly. Murphy and Emori exchange awkward glances.

“What?” Raven is either genuinely oblivious or a damn good actress. “Listen, I fell that one time.”

“And you broke half the plates in the kitchen!” Octavia exclaims, sweeping into the kitchen with her arms full of laundry. “We’re still using Bellamy’s.”

“I asked for a new plate set for Christmas,” Raven grumbles to Octavia’s back. As Octavia loads the washing machine, Raven reaches above her to grab a laundry basket from the shelf and thrust it into Octava’s line of sight. “Use this.”

Octavia swats her hand away. “Is this what adulting has come to?” she asks dramatically. “Asking for practical things as gifts? When did we get so boring?”

“Speak for yourself,” Raven says magnanimously. “I am full of adventure and surprises.”

Murphy snorts, as any best friend would, but his mind and eyes are on Emori, on the way her eyes sparkle with amusement as she looks from Raven to Octavia and back again. The subtle shifts of time have been kind to her; the shadows under her eyes are lighter and the glimmer in them is brighter. Her smiles - the best thing about her, in his opinion - no longer hold sadness behind their bared teeth. 

“When are we getting our Christmas tree?” Monty asks, breaking Murphy out of his thoughts.

“Are we getting one?” Raven asks, confused. Octavia crosses the kitchen to the cupboards and grabs her mug. Luna, probably sensing the conversation no longer applies to her, reaches for her bag and starts reading a textbook. Emori picks at a scab on her arm. Monty just blinks, confused. “Hello?”

“Gee, Reyes, I don’t know,” Murphy says finally. “Would you  _ like  _ to get a Christmas tree?”

“I want a Christmas tree,” Emori says softly.

Murphy, Octavia and Monty go get a Christmas tree.

* * *

“How did you say we do this again?” Octavia shouts in the general direction of her phone. Only her legs stick out from under the tree they’re attempting to set up in Raven’s living room. The sight would be comical, Murphy thinks, except for the fact that he’s not looking much better; he’s covered in pine needles and sap, and his arm hurts from bracing the tree that none of them can figure out how to set in the base.

“Are you sure it’s in all the way?” Bellamy’s tinny voice asks from Octavia’s phone speakers.

“No!” Octavia yells. “That’s why we called you!”

Murphy cracks a smile at the sigh Bellamy heaves. “I’m going to be there in two minutes. Hold on.”

Octavia extracts herself from the tree and brushes pine needles from her hair. Murphy makes a big show of switching the tree’s weight from one arm to the other. Octavia rolls her eyes. “Better make it a minute,” she says into the phone. “Murphy’s holding up the tree until we can screw it into the base. You know he can’t handle more than five pounds.”

“Hey!” Murphy protests as Bellamy laughs. Octavia relieves him of his tree-holding duties and Murphy escapes upstairs to his room before the younger Blake can convince him to help her a second time. The first time was a rookie mistake

He’s at a loss for what to do in his spare time. His old habit of knocking on Emori’s door tugs at his hands, but he pulls away after a moment of staring at the worn brown wood like a pining idiot. Instead, he goes into his own room - leaving the door open in a moment that lacks his usual paranoia - and flings his closet door open.

“What are you doing?” he hears Emori ask him as he rifles through the mounds of papers, clothes and books shoved into the dark corners of the closet.

“Looking for something,” he responds, trying to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest at the sound of Emori’s voice. It’s low, a little cautious, but not angry. He’ll take it. “What’s up?

“You bought me a tree.” It’s a statement, said with carefulness and a little bit of wonder.

Murphy extricates himself, rocks back on his heels, and looks at her. “Well, it’s for everyone but… yeah. Of course we did.”

She frowns. “That’s not an ‘of course’,” she says.

“It is for us.”

After a moment, Murphy looks behind him. The item he seeks is in plain view, for once. “Aha,” he mutters, pulling the heavy cookbook from the shadows.

Emori frowns again. “A cookbook?”

“My dad’s,” Murphy says, touching the stained, worn cover. “All the best recipes are in here. He changed a lot of them. I don’t really go by the book anymore; just his handwriting.”

Emori holds out her bigger hand and lets him take it to hoist himself to his feet. When she moves to pull her hand away, he holds it a little tighter. “You’re not covering it up.”

She shakes her head. “I… I wanted to try it.”

Murphy gives it a gentle squeeze, feeling a deep sort of affection surge through him at the feeling of her tough skin against his. “I’m proud of you.” The words grate on his throat. He hopes she hears the  _ I’m trying  _ underneath.

It’s not his place to say. He thinks about it after the fact and feels relieved when she doesn’t punch him for it.

“Thanks,” is all she says, with a soft smile. Then she tilts her head to look over his shoulder. “Your closet is a mess.”

Murphy looks back at it, at the piles of books and papers spilling out and the mess of dirty laundry on his floor. “Yeah,” he says with a short laugh. “I guess you could say that.”

“I am saying that.” Emori steps around him and kneels down in front of the open doors. “Do you need these?” she asks, scooping up a pile of papers.

“You don’t have to-”

She cuts him off with a wave of her hand. “We don’t have anything better to do. Now come on; do you need these or not?”

Murphy sits beside her and together they sort through his mess, one dirty article of clothing and wrecked piece of paper at a time. Emori finds an old photo album that used to belong to Murphy’s mother and flips through it, smiling at Murphy’s first birthday picture and touching his parents’ wedding photo with the fused fingers of her left hand.

“Your mom looks beautiful,” she murmurs, tracing the fall of the wedding veil with a careful hand. “They look happy.”

Murphy pointedly avoids looking at the picture. “They were,” he says gruffly, clearing his throat. His eyes flit to the cookbook on the floor near his foot. “For a while, anyway.”

“What happened?” Emori asks softly. “I mean, if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”

Murphy shakes his head. This isn’t a piece of him he cares about, not like his abandonment issues and his valleys and mountains. This is the way life was. “He died. He had bad lungs, I guess. Caught the flu from me, but he didn’t get better. He got worse and he died. Mom blamed me, started drinking and died from that.”

It sounds callous, but he thinks he’ll lose his mind if he goes too far back to those times. Ontari had come onto the scene about three months before his mother died. She got him out of the house and the few times when she was kind were good enough for him. Looking back, he was probably just grateful that no one was hitting him. When she made him do something much more damaging, he didn’t mind; he owed her, he reasoned. He owed her for making her put up with him.

Emori frowns softly. “I’m still sorry.”

Murphy shrugs. “At least, when they were both alive, they loved me. And each other.”

Emori nods and goes back to the photo album. Murphy knows better than to believe she’s let the subject drop. She’ll think about it and come back minutes, hours or even days later with another thought, a strange observation, some perspective he never even entertained. It’s who she is.

He loves that about her.

Emori sets the book aside without another comment and goes back to the closet. She pulls out two shirts - both of them wrinkled and stiff - and scrunches up her nose. “John! It’s like you’re in high school!”

Murphy rolls his eyes at her, then yelps when she throws the, admittedly, _very_ dirty laundry at him. “Hey!”

“Get a clothes hamper!” She laughs when he tries to fling a shirt back at her, but only succeeds in smacking himself in the face with it. “I lived on the street for three years, and even I know a hamper is a better solution than this!”

Murphy decides not to touch on the whole “living-on-the-street” thing. Instead, he reaches for the laundry basket of clothes he still hasn’t folded, dumps the clean clothes on the floor and throws his dirty shirts inside. “Happy?”

Emori eyes the clean clothes on the floor, then blinks at him. “You haven’t folded your laundry either?”

“Good behavior comes in small portions,” Murphy snarks, a little bit of truth coloring the frail joke. Emori merely hums and scoots over to start folding his socks.

Is it a little weird to see the girl you possibly love folding your underwear? Yeah. But Murphy doesn’t mind, not when the faint sunlight from the window dances over her hand and she sees him watching. She gives him a tiny smile and rolls his socks into neat balls.

They sit like that for a while in comfortable silence until his closet is organized and his clothes are put away, and then Bellamy breaks the quiet by shouting a litany of curses as what is presumably the tree creaks and crashes its way to the floor.

Murphy and Emori laugh the whole way downstairs, and laugh even harder as Bellamy lays there, on the floor, arms sticking out from either side of a mass of pine needles.

* * *

Eventually, Bellamy rights the tree. Raven gripes endlessly about the fact that Jasper and Monty’s roomba (“We’re  _ not  _ calling it Stabby!”) was better than a regular vacuum at getting the pine needles out of the carpet, and Lexa and Octavia appear mere seconds after the cleanup ends with arms full of wrapped presents.

“Have you been hiding those this whole time?” Bellamy asks, scratching the back of his neck. When Octavia nods cheerfully, he rolls his eyes. “Of course you have.”

“Can Costia come over to open presents with us?” Lexa asks. When Raven gives her a thumbs-up, Lexa whacks Bellamy on the back. “You should come and bring your hot girlfriend.”

“You have a hot girlfriend too,” Bellamy points out, the wry twist of his mouth emphasizing how awkward it is for him to say the phrase. Murphy is sure he finds it objectifying. “But if Raven doesn’t mind…”

“Everyone can bring someone for all I care,” Raven says casually. “If they can fit, they can sit.”

“Like a cat,” Monty says from the kitchen. Raven doesn’t dignify that with a response.

Murphy looks over at Emori, who’s holding a tiny glass ornament in her hands, presumably plucked from one of the boxes on the couch, which are full of Christmas decorations from Raven’s attic. It’s a small crystal ornament, heavy and solid, with beautiful etchings and a tiny red ribbon to hang it by. Murphy thinks it was a gift from Raven’s grandparents to her mother. Oh well. No love lost there, clearly.

Emori tucks it back in the box after a minute. When she turns her back, Murphy pulls it out of the box and casually crosses over to the dining room table, where Emori’s jacket is draped over a chair. He reaches for it, then remembers he’s trying to do better.

Raven is sitting on a stool in the kitchen, going through his cookbook. “Your dad has surprisingly neat handwriting,” she tells him when he approaches her, the crystal cool in his hands.

Murphy holds up the ornament. “Can I give this to her?” he asks Raven in a low voice. 

Raven cocks an eyebrow at him. “Why?”

“She likes it.”

Raven’s eyes shift. They go hard, then questioning, then soft. “Sure.” She shrugs. “Mom never really liked it anyway.”

Murphy tucks it into Emori’s jacket pocket. The pride in Raven’s eyes is unmistakable. For the first time in a long while, he lets himself be proud too.


	12. Dear Forgiveness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she leans forward to peck him on the cheek, he flinches forward and to the side ever-so-slightly and their lips touch for a brief moment. Monty wolf-whistles and Jasper cheers while Emori covers her mouth with her smaller hand and blinks shyly at him.
> 
> “I’m sorry-“ he stammers, but Emori leans forward again, throwing her arms around his shoulders and kissing him soundly on the mouth. “Oh.”
> 
> “Get it, J!” Raven yells while Lexa groans something about straight people being unable to control themselves.

_ I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.   
_ We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .   
_ When I say this, it should mean laughter,   
_ _ not poison.   
_ _ I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.   
_ _ Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.   
_ __ Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

* * *

Emori’s glass ornament catches the light from her window and casts beams of cool sunshine in fractures on the hallway wall. Murphy follows those beams to her doorway late on Christmas morning.

He watches as her smaller fingers caress the small delicate etchings there and smiles when he sees the fingers on her larger hand peeking out from the sleeve of her red and green sweater. She doesn’t cover it that often now, and he’s glad; his deep affection for the appendage has never wavered, and he likes seeing it out in the open every now and again, a sign of the comfort she’s found here.

Murphy watches her for another moment before knocking on her open door. She turns. Her hair is messy. She’s wearing the most hideous Christmas sweater he’s ever seen - bright red and green with tiny ornaments hooked into the neckline. He doesn’t have to touch her skin to know it’s warm, from both sleep and sun, and maybe some excitement too, if her flushed cheeks are telling the truth.

“Merry Christmas,” she says softly, a hesitant smile wrinkling the corner of her mouth. “Like my sweater?”

Murphy can’t help but laugh. “It’s...something.”

“Jasper gave it to me,” she says by way of explanation. “He, Monty and Octavia have matching ones.”

“Of course they do,” he grumbles, imagining the look on Raven’s face when she sees, and how Bellamy’s probably going to bust a nut. He must smirk at the thought, because Emori snorts and gives him a tiny smile. “What?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. Her hair swishes around her face, and a few strands of it catch on the ornaments on her neckline. “Damn, that’s going to get annoying.”

“Here, let me,” he says, reaching for her hair at the same time she does. Her hands fall back into place as she lets him smooth the hair back. 

“Thanks,” she murmurs. Her eyes flick down to his mouth, then back up again. He thinks about saying  _ thought that was my move,  _ but bites his tongue, knowing he might get sucker-punched for it. He’s still not sure where they stand with one another, not after what he did and said, or after their small reconciliation the day after Thanksgiving.

She grins up at him, and suddenly it doesn’t matter. “Hey,” she says conspiratorially, “want to pull a prank?”

Of course he does.

They sneak downstairs and quietly divest the space under the tree of every gift underneath. They hide each wrapped package somewhere in the house; the more obscure, the better. Murphy is immensely proud of himself for thinking to hide his gift to Bellamy on the roof, right behind the chimney, and Raven’s in the oven.

“I hid Monty’s inside the couch,” Emori whispers to him as they scamper back up the stairs. Her eyes are shining with mischief. Murphy wonders if she ever pranked Otan. He also wonders if she’s ever had a Christmas the “traditional” way, but can’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t be rude. Hey, at least he cares. It’s a start.

They stay in his room until the house wakes up. She walks around and reads the papers on his walls; he sits in his desk chair and watches her move carefully around the small space. Strands of her hair stick to the fuzz of her sweater. She looks warm; she radiates happiness. It’s a good look on her.

He shakes himself out of his snappiness just in time for Octavia’s door to bang open. “Merry Christmas, bitches!” she shouts, yelping as Lexa groans and probably throws something at her head. “Let’s get this bread!”

“Let’s get this- what?” Emori asks, adorably confused.

Murphy laughs and stands up. “Don’t ask. Come on, let’s go see the fruits of our labor.”

They make it downstairs just in time to hear the crunching of Bellamy’s tires on the snow outside and the roar of Zeke’s motorcycle. Murphy holds up one hand, counting down from five on his fingers. When he gets to one, Emori grins as Bellamy hollers, “What the hell?!”

“Nailed it,” Emori singsongs. Murphy snorts.

The door bangs open and Bellamy sticks his head in. “You put my present on the damn roof?!” he shouts.

Murphy grins impishly. “What makes you think it was me?”

Raven opens the oven door, then throws her hands up in exasperation. “Seriously, Murphy? Again?”

“It was my idea,” Emori says, her eyes laughing but her face straight. Raven rolls her eyes, but there’s a smile there that tells Murphy she’s just glad the two of them are working together on something.

Murphy snorts as Monty jumps up to retrieve a package hidden atop the microwave. Emori blinks at him. “Wait… Raven said ‘again’...”

“Oh yeah.” Murphy tilts his head and smiles. “I may or may not have done this last year.”

Emori smirks. “And here I thought I was original.”

Bellamy stomps into the kitchen, tracking snow on the tile. Raven squawks and swats him with a kitchen towel, but he ignores her. “Whatever this is,” he says, holding a damp package aloft, “I don’t want it.”

“You say that now,” Emori singsongs, then leans over to whisper in Murphy’s ear, “It’s a book. He’s going to love it. And I wrapped it in plastic, anyway.”

Bellamy peels off said plastic and drops it in the sink. As Jasper, Monty, Octavia and Lexa clatter down the stairs, he rips off the soggy paper and gives Emori a soft smile. “Thank you,” he says, holding the book up so she can see the cover, even though she’s the one who gave it to him. “I love it.”

Murphy’s heart warms when Emori grins. “I knew it!” she cheers to herself quietly, pumping her fist, a gesture no doubt learned from Monty.

The rest of the house starts ripping into presents too; Raven throws the crow-printed socks Murphy gave her at his head, Lexa races to the kitchen to pour orange juice into her “Classy, Sassy and a Little Smart-Assy” mug from Octavia, and Emori wraps herself up in the massive knitted scarf Murphy found at a street market in the city.

“This is the best present I’ve ever gotten, John,” she says, her smile as warm as the wool wrapped around her neck. “Thank you.”

Murphy’s heart feels like it’s going to leap out of his chest. “You’re welcome.”

When she leans forward to peck him on the cheek, he flinches forward and to the side ever-so-slightly and their lips touch for a brief moment. Monty wolf-whistles and Jasper cheers while Emori covers her mouth with her smaller hand and blinks shyly at him. 

“I’m sorry-“ he stammers, but Emori leans forward again, throwing her arms around his shoulders and kissing him soundly on the mouth. “Oh.”

“Get it, J!” Raven yells while Lexa groans something about straight people being unable to control themselves.

“Merry Christmas, John,” Emori whispers. She gets to her feet, scarf still wrapped around her shoulders, and pads to the kitchen in search of coffee, leaving a stunned Murphy and his delighted friends behind.

* * *

Breakfast and lunch are haphazard affairs since everyone agreed they’d rather save room for the massive dinner Bellamy, Murphy and Zeke are preparing. Zeke shows up around noon, bearing bags full of groceries and presents. Luna follows him a moment later, Costia in tow. Lexa looks delighted, if not a little terrified, to see her surrogate older sister commiserating with her girlfriend.

“Relax,” Murphy tells her. “This could end really well for you.”

“Or really poorly,” Lexa mutters, eyeing Luna. “Luna’s a straight shooter. She could scare Cos away if she doesn’t approve.”

“My kind of woman,” Murphy remarks, yelping when Raven smacks him upside the head. “Ow?!”

“Your kind of woman is over there, and she’s the jealous type,” Raven says, pointing a thumb at Emori, who’s standing on the kitchen counter, digging around in the cabinet.

“Not jealous,” Emori calls over her shoulder, “Just possessive.”

Lexa wiggles her eyebrows. Raven rolls her eyes, and Luna laughs into her coffee cup.

Bellamy starts to get agitated around three when the roast for dinner isn’t cooking right. Murphy tries to help - it  _ is  _ his crockpot, after all - but quickly gets derailed when he realizes the kitchen is not big enough for all three cooks.

“Sorry, man,” he says to Zeke, whose efforts to shimmy behind Murphy failed after Murphy stepped back, almost whacking Raven’s almost-boyfriend in the head in the process. 

“Oh no, no, you’re fine,” Zeke says, quick-stepping over Bellamy’s leg and putting a pan on the counter.

“What did you just say?” Raven calls from the living room, where she’s trying to install the new coding software Bellamy got her for Christmas.

“I said he was fine,” Zeke says.

“How Midwestern of you,” Costia remarks drily.

Zeke raises an eyebrow at her. “How did you know?”

“It’s easy to tell,” she says. “You say words funny.”

Raven hoots. Zeke groans and disappears into Raven’s room, where they’re storing all their coats. After a moment, Raven goes to join him.

“Have fun, Reyes,” Murphy calls after her.

“Fuck straight off, Murphy,” she replies. Emori whistles. When her eyes meet Murphy’s, she stands up.

“John, I forgot to give you your card,” she says. Murphy carefully picks his way across the crowded kitchen and dining room to reach her. She hands him a small envelope, then disappears upstairs before he can even break the seal.

The card’s printed sentiment is lame, but her written words aren’t. To his surprise and embarrassment, Murphy can’t help but blink back some tears as he reads. If anyone notices, they know better than to comment.

_ John, _

_ Christmas is supposed to be a time for family, but my family isn’t here this year. I thought I would be heartbroken, but I’m not. You are my family, and so is Raven and everyone else. I’m not good at this sappy shit - clearly, since I wrote a swear word in a Christmas card - but I’m going to try. _

_ When I answered Raven’s ad, I had no idea the love and safety you all would bring into my life. Thank you for your part in that. Thank you for loving me how you are able to, and thank you for trying to love me better by loving yourself. I see you, and I love you. _

_ Merry Christmas, John. Never forget how loved you are, by me and everyone else. _

_ -Em _

* * *

During dinner, they sit at the dining room table and on the floor in the living room, spreading their Christmas Eve feast over end tables and folding chairs that no one wants to sit on for some reason. Murphy sits at the table elbow-to-elbow with Raven and Emori; Zeke and Bellamy sit across from them. Monty, Jasper, Lexa, Octavia and Costia sprawl on the floor, while Luna and Echo take over the couch. Raven tries to play music two separate times - “It’s for the Ambiance,” Octavia says, and Murphy just knows the capital A is implied -  but the noise coming from all corners of the house renders that effort more chaotic than mood-setting.

Murphy keeps sneaking glances at Emori. Her eyes shine with excitement and delight as she takes a massive serving of Zeke’s now-famous corn casserole. She grins when Raven starts roasting Bellamy for only getting books for Christmas. She even smiles at Murphy once or twice, which sends his heart rate through the ceiling.

Echo finishes first and starts in on the dishes. Bellamy follows, brushing her shoulder with his hand as he leans past her to start drying plates. Murphy watches them over his shoulder, the confidence in their movements, the ease with which they exist in one another’s space. When he turns back to face the table, he locks eyes with Emori and sees his longing and jealousy mirrored there.

Time slows down in the moments between clearing his plate and ending up in Emori’s room. Somehow he ends up at her bedroom door looking at her back, braced against the window frame, her legs swinging over the window’s edge, hair blowing in the cold West Virginia wind. It’s a mirror of this morning’s moment, or maybe an inversion, since her back is to him in this instance, though her face is turned upward.

“I never had a Christmas like this,” he hears her say to the wind. He steps inside her room but doesn’t shut the door. “With people and presents and noise and happiness.”

“Was it- Did you like it?” He winces at his own verbal ineptitude. 

She nods, sniffs and looks over her shoulder. Her eyes glitter in the pale light from the hall. “Come sit with me,” she says softly, beckoning with her smaller hand.

When he’s comfortably seated with his head leaning against the window frame, his body snug between it and Emori’s legs, she rests her forehead on his shoulder and speaks to his upper arm. “I miss you.”

The distance between him is his own doing. The ache in his chest is, too. “I’m sorry.”

_ How do I cross the line between us?  _ he wants to ask, but doesn’t want to come off either dramatic or desperate, even though he is both, just by nature.

“Thank you for your card,” he says softly. He turns, rests his chin atop her head, and resists the urge to press a kiss atop it. “It meant a lot.”

“I meant it.” Her voice is muffled. She doesn’t look up at him, but he can feel the wrinkle of her forehead through his sweater. 

“You okay?”

She lifts her head. There’s a look in her eyes, equal parts caged animal and hesitant human. “If I let you in, you can’t hurt me. I won’t let you.”

Murphy takes a deep breath. Here, on his side of the drawn line, there is everything he is ashamed of. On her side, there is the smile in her voice when she speaks to him and the soft way she says his given name.

“I can’t promise I won’t hurt you,” he says slowly. “But I won’t try to.”

Emori smiles, sudden and blinding. She turns to face him, shifting so she’s straddling the windowsill. The ornaments on her God-awful sweater glint and tap together as she moves.

“Okay.” She kisses him on the cheek, then the nose. He grins. “Let’s start over.”

Murphy leans forward and presses his lips to hers, a proper kiss this time. When she laughs against his mouth, his chest expands. Then he’s the one who laughs as he remembers a line from a particular Christmas movie.

“What?” she asks, pulling away. And then Raven’s voice sounds from the doorway, where she’s leaning against the frame, looking as self-satisfied as he’s ever seen her.

“‘And the Grinch’s small heart’,” she quotes dramatically, a shit-eating grin wide on her face, “‘grew three sizes that day’.”

Emori howls with laughter. The foot dangling from the window kicks in the air. Murphy reaches for the nearest pillow near the foot of Emori’s bed and chucks it at Raven, who shrieks and limps downstairs. Murphy catches up to her by sliding down the bannister and tosses the couch’s blanket over her head, then proceeds to tickle her in the stomach until she goes to her knees, laughing and wheezing and pushing a worried Zeke away.

Murphy looks up after pulling the blanket off Raven’s head and locks eyes with Emori, who hovers at the top of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, one hand on the first step down. It’s a mirror of a moment during her first day at home: her hesitant eyes, Murphy and Raven on the couch, his nonchalant “you can come down.”

An invitation, he thinks. A request, maybe, and certainly an assurance that no matter where he is, she belongs. That no matter where she is, he is wanted. 

“You can come down,” he says to her quietly. She takes a step down. Behind him, Zeke helps Raven to her feet. 

“You can come down,” Murphy says to her again, remembering waiting at the bottom of the stairs on their first date, awestruck at her beautiful dress and the warmth in her cheeks.

Emori’s feet hit the floor beside him. She slings her arm around his shoulder and he reaches up to play with the long fingers of her left hand. While watching Monty, Raven and Zeke make a nest on the couch to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, Murphy presses a kiss to every part of her hand he can reach.

“ _ Dear Forgiveness,”  _ he hears her murmur, almost to herself, in that casual, thoughtful way, “ _ I saved a place for you. Quit milling around the yard and come inside _ .”

She kisses him on the cheek, disentangles herself from him, and goes to sit beside Raven, squealing when the other girl’s cold feet make contact with her bare ankles. Murphy watches them all, lit by the kitchen light and the glow of the TV, and wonders if it’s possible for a heart to break from happiness.

If it is, he supposes, as he leans his forearms against the couch inches from Raven’s head, he’ll gladly handle this kind of heartbreak now until forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeet yeet babey we did it
> 
> The end of this story is bittersweet for me in a strange way. I started writing Litany during a time in my life where I was not doing well, mentally, physically or emotionally. This story became a strange form of catharsis, a way for me to access the dark things in me and process them through the eyes of a character who resembles me in ways I'd rather not think about.
> 
> As Murphy and Emori learned and grew and recovered, I tried to do the same. Clearly, I'm not there yet (as evidenced by the two times I almost deleted this fic on a self-destructive whim). But there's always hope as long as you learn how to forgive yourself.
> 
> If you're dealing with stuff like this, please talk to someone. A parent, a teacher, a friend, a therapist, someone. My asks on Tumblr are always open (my Tumblr name is the same as here). We all need a Raven, an Emori, a Bellamy and a Luna sometimes.
> 
> Thanks for reading this. I hope you liked it. I'll see you soon, never fear :)
> 
> Much love,  
> Amanda


End file.
